Creating future scenarios to review policies in Uganda and Tanzania

Policymakers, researchers, and development practitioners from Tanzania and Uganda are reviewing various policies in their countries by developing socioeconomic and climate scenarios. The scenarios created will help identify and address gaps in the policies.   

This started with a series of workshops organized by the Policy Action and Climate Change Action (PACCA) project in collaboration with respective national partners in the two countries and the University of Oxford.

The project, launched last year, is supporting Uganda and Tanzania in the development of policies that are climate resilient; it is led by IITA and is part of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) Flagship Program on Policies and Institutions on Climate-Resilient Food.

Dr Edidah Ampaire from IITA Uganda,  the PACCA Project Coordinator, said that the scenarios were important tools to help in policy analysis. “What we want to see are inclusive and better informed policies that are climate resilient and that provide for the well-guided investment of resources,” she said.

“The use of scenarios helps policymakers to engage strategically with such complex and uncertain issues as climate change. The participants developed diverse, challenging scenarios and used them to ‘crash test’  the policy to understand its strengths and weaknesses, get ideas to improve on it, and make it more robust,” said Joost Vervoort, a Scenarios Officer for CCAFS at the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University.

In Tanzania, the new Environmental Policy was reviewed at the two-day workshop, held 16–17 February at Morogoro, and organized in collaboration with the Division of Environment at the Vice President’s office.

Speaking during the official opening of the workshop, Dr Julius Ningu, the Director of the Division of Environment at the Vice President’s Office, noted that the workshop came at an opportune moment as the country was revising its Environmental Policy. He explained that the country’s current National Environmental Policy had been set up in 1997 and was therefore not responsive to some of the emerging environmental issues. These included climate change, biofuels, and genetically modified organisms as well as invasive alien species and electronic and electronic equipment wastes (e-Wastes). Therefore the Government through the Vice President’s Office had initiated a comprehensive review of the policy. In Uganda, the policymakers converging in Jinja, 19-20 February, used the scenarios crafted to develop the first drafts of an implementation plan for the country’s National Agriculture Policy (NAP) and revise the Mechanization Framework (MF) summary.