Tanzania’s grazing land plan aims to have six million hectares formally surveyed, mapped and titled for livestock keepers by 2030, a target officials say is already moving faster than the baseline numbers from earlier this year suggested. Deputy Minister for Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development Kaspar Mmuya told Parliament in Dodoma on 4 September that more than 3.6 million hectares have now been set aside for livestock use nationwide, with over 1.3 million hectares across 365 villages surveyed and gazetted during the 2025-26 year alone.
The plan first surfaced in public view in January, when Deputy Minister for Livestock and Fisheries Ng’wasi Kamani told Parliament the government intended to raise designated grazing land from roughly 3.49 million hectares to 6 million within five years, an increase of 2.51 million hectares. Both ministers tied the target to the same source: the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party’s election manifesto and a pledge President Samia Suluhu Hassan made when the current Parliament opened in November last year.
Certificates meant to settle old disputes
The practical output of the plan is a stack of paperwork that has historically been scarce in rural Tanzania. Across 53 separate areas covering about 790,866 hectares, residents have now received Certificates of Customary Right of Occupancy, legal documents that formalise land rights pastoralist communities often held only by custom and local memory. Officials describe the certificates as central to the plan’s second purpose, which is reducing the violence that has periodically flared between herders and crop farmers competing for the same land.
That competition is structural rather than incidental. Tanzania holds an estimated 21 million cattle, yet only about 44 million of its roughly 94.5 million hectares of land are classified as arable, leaving farming and grazing to compete directly for a limited and heavily contested resource. Officials have long pointed to the absence of clear land-use plans as a driver of clashes between the two groups, arguing that formal designation, rather than informal arrangements that can shift with each new dry season, offers the more durable fix.
Two ministries, one target
The fact that two different deputy ministers, from two different ministries, have fronted public updates on the same hectare target in the space of eight months suggests the plan now sits high enough on the government’s agenda to warrant coordination across departments that do not always work closely together. Land allocation falls under one ministry, livestock policy under another, and getting both to report consistent progress numbers is itself a sign officials are treating the target as a political commitment rather than an aspirational figure buried in a five-year strategy document.
Whether the remaining roughly 2.4 million hectares can be surveyed, gazetted and certified within the stated timeline remains to be seen, particularly given how much of the recent progress concentrated in a single year. Land surveying in rural Tanzania typically involves local committees verifying boundaries village by village, a process that can stall over disputes between neighbouring communities even when the broader political will to proceed is clear.
For herding communities who have waited years for formal recognition of land they have used for generations, officials say the direction of travel matters as much as the final date on the calendar. A certificate does not by itself add a single hectare of new grazing capacity, but it does give pastoralist families a legal document to point to the next time a dispute with a neighbouring farm reaches a local court or a village council, something that was often missing in the conflicts officials cite as the plan’s original motivation.
