Tatu Mtwangi Limbumba

Low-income households in Sub-Saharan Africa have limited resilience to climate change shocks despite the region's unique socio-cultural support structures. This article explores how socio-cultural structures such as gender norms, social networks, social cohesion, trust, indigenous knowledge, customs and traditions, and cultural values of reciprocity shape climate-resilient social protection pathways among low-income households. Drawing on the climate-resilience development pathway (CRDP) and social capital theoretical frameworks, this study uses a qualitative, exploratory case study design. Using a sample of 100 households, 6 key informants, and 2 focus group discussions, the findings show that integrating socio-cultural structures with climate-resilient initiatives such as social protection is a pathway to inclusive and sustainable resilience to flood shocks among low-income households in urban informal settlements such as Dar es Salaam. Findings also revealed that, even when social protection initiatives are integrated with climate-resilient features, socio-cultural structures remained relevant and effective for climate-resilient pathways. Socio-cultural structures informed the design of climate-resilience (mitigation and adaptation) strategies and built climate-resilient social protection pathways, including short- and long-term resilience such as anticipatory, absorptive, adaptive, and transformative resilience. This study empirically validates CRDP and offers a context-sensitive understanding of socio-cultural structures as mediators, demonstrating their importance in designing and implementing climate-resilient, inclusive, accessible, and sustainable social protection initiatives. The study contributes to policy by framing socio-cultural structures as enabling systems that shape resilience strategies and pathways.

Inclusive education (IE) for learners with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has become a major policy priority. However, its meaning in everyday school and community contexts remains unevenly understood among different stakeholders. This participatory qualitative study examined how teachers, parents/caregivers, and neighbors conceptualized IE for learners with ASD in three urban public primary schools in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Data were collected from 30 participants using participant-generated photographs, photo-elicitation discussions, and follow-up unstructured interviews. Photographs and participants’ narratives were analyzed together as a single photovoice dataset using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings indicated that participants generally supported IE in principle but negotiated its implementation through conditions related to learner ability, school capacity, safety, educational expectations, and responsibility for support. Participants prioritized practical outcomes over academic success; they valued togetherness, physical presence, and teacher-led responsibility while giving comparatively less attention to broader rights-based dimensions of IE. Parents and neighbors emphasized belonging and acceptance, whereas teachers emphasized feasibility, specialist support, and practical implementation constraints. The study introduces the concept of conditional inclusion to describe a form of support that extends beyond placement decisions by showing how inclusion is negotiated through local assumptions about learner ability, school capacity, safety, educational expectations, and responsibility for support. These findings suggest that locally grounded community engagement is essential for adapting IE policies and practices for learners with ASD in comparable low-resource urban contexts.

Photovoice is a popular participatory research method for instigating critical reflection and social change. It does, however, rely on participants being able to photographically capture the phenomenon under study. This raises challenging questions that may obstruct the use of Photovoice in climate change studies. Is climate change visible? Can it be photographically captured? What change can Photovoice instigate in the context of global climate change? To gain clarity on the role of Photovoice in climate change studies, this article provides an overview of previously published work. We do this to identify some of the different ways in which Photovoice can usefully capture various aspects of climate change and to critically appraise the studies' ability to fully leverage Photovoice's change potentials. We identify five ways in which Photovoice is used to study climate change. This includes studying (i) how local people understand climate change, (ii) how people experience the (perceived) impacts of climate change, (iii) community perspectives on their vulnerabilities to climate change, (iv) local adaptation and mitigation responses, and finally, (v) ways of facilitating transformative learning about climate change. While many studies effectively capture people's intersubjective relationships with climate change, the action‐oriented social change potential of Photovoice is rarely realized. Future Photovoice projects must consider the theoretical underpinnings of the method and be intentional about its emancipatory and change potential, particularly by collaborating with powerful change agents, thereby increasing the likelihood that Photovoice findings will translate into policy changes and community initiatives.

This paper reviews the agriculture policy frameworks and their performance indicators for poverty reduction among youths in Tanzania. A systematic literature review and a multivariate analytical approach was applied using principal component analysis. A total of 31 out of 320 articles were selected through a systematic selection process. The findings reveal that the frameworks promised to allocate land, finance and training to youths; provide access to agricultural inputs, improved seeds, fertilizers, knowledge, and mechanization; provision of infrastructures, enhancing market access, promoting technical and entrepreneurship skills; and facilitate linkage between youths and other support initiatives, improvement of social services, and promotion of rural development. The study urges the government and other stakeholders to guarantee youth farmers access to productive resources, subsidized inputs, agriculture marketing, and information and extension services specifically targeting youths. It is important to involve youths in developing agricultural policy frameworks to build their sense of ownership and ensure that their matters are well articulated in the agriculture frameworks.

This chapter provides a gendered understanding of how the ‘rules’ governing sanitation practices and work (ranging across laws, bylaws, and social norms) affect the realisation of aspirations for decent work expressed by off-grid sanitation workers. We draw on our research in three African cities (Beira in Mozambique, Freetown in Sierra Leone, and Mwanza in Tanzania) with women and men involved in paid and unpaid sanitation work. Our analysis highlights that formal law-based rules are biased towards ‘modern’ grid systems and simultaneously over-regulate and exclude off-grid paid sanitation workers, making their livelihoods ‘undecent’ (impossible, arduous, under-rewarded), while under-regulating unpaid sanitation work (predominantly performed by women), thereby reinforcing their invisibility and lack of protection. In contrast, community-based bylaws often enable the livelihoods of off-grid sanitation workers and the de facto practices that meet the sanitation needs of the majority of African urban dwellers, while not always advancing safe and healthy working conditions. In this context, we explore how sanitation workers actively negotiate and use these different systems of rules to pursue their aspirations for decent work, in ways which range from coping mechanisms to more transformative strategies, often through collective action.

This article aims to understand grassroots responses to COVID-19 and how they impacted the well-being of low-income informal communities in Dar es Salaam. An exploratory qualitative research design, using semi-structured questionnaires, was adopted for use in Ubungo Kisiwani and Hanna Nassif settlements. Focus group discussions with select members of the community, including women’s groups, and mtaa (sub-ward) and ten-cell leaders, were held. The selection of respondents took into account the socio-economic and spatial characteristics of the two communities. Although Tanzania’s response to COVID-19 was based on a partial lockdown, these measures led to decline in income and loss of livelihoods among the poor. Likewise, several low-income persons, particularly those working in the hospitality industry, were temporarily retrenched owing to the poor business environment, severely undermining their ability to pay for basic services. The largely collective but limited social capital deployed by grassroots actors were crucial safety nets for the most vulnerable. These have to be acknowledged and coordinated. Mixed land use in informal settlements also proved useful in providing convenient access to the basic needs of households; reducing the need to travel outside one’s neighbourhood, thus enhancing the resilience of the communities.