Community-Governed Water Access and Livestock Management as Smallholder Food Security Infrastructure: The Maasai System of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania
USE AND APPLICATION OF CFS POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS ON EMPOWERING FAMILY FARMERS: CALL FOR SHARING EXPERIENCES AND GOOD PRACTICES
Report Submitted to the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), April 2026
Author: Stephanie Zabriskie
ORCID: 0009-0000-9273-1529
Affiliation: Humanculture (Indigenous-led nonprofit organization)
Capacity: Founder and Executive Director
Abstract
This paper documents the Maasai livestock-based system in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area of Tanzania as a functioning form of smallholder food security infrastructure under prolonged climate stress. Groundwater access, pasture management, and livestock production are coordinated through community-governed systems that regulate shared resources and sustain household-level production. Milk, meat, and blood provide direct nutritional intake, while livestock also function as economic assets supporting healthcare and education needs. Operating under regulatory constraints on cultivation and movement, and across recurring drought cycles, the system maintains continuity through distributed water access and governance-enforced resource sequencing. This paper demonstrates that the Maasai system fulfills the functions that external development interventions seek to establish, providing a working model of smallholder production sustained through existing governance and resource systems.
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