Determinants of access to marine cultural heritage assets for poverty alleviation in the coastal communities of Kilwa and Bagamoyo in Tanzania

ABSTRACT

The communities in the districts of Bagamoyo and Kilwa in Tanzania depend much on marine cultural heritage (MCH) assets for their economic well-being. This study aimed to establish factors that determined access to the MCH assets in Bagamoyo and Kilwa, and the way the communities benefited from them. Purposive sampling was used to get 161 respondents from four groups, including 24 local tour guides,76 fishermen, 22 singers-dancers and 39 crafters. Four village government leaders and one antiquity official were also involved in the study. The study collected data through interviews and a questionnaire. The findings of the study revealed that the groups did not benefit from the MCH assets because of using poor technology, insufficient financial support, inadequate training and little community participation in decision making. The article recommends that the stakeholders should initiate efforts that will enable the communities to benefit from the MCH assets for poverty alleviation purposes.

KEYWORDS:

• Marine cultural heritage
• access
• coastal communities
• poverty alleviation
• assets

Acknowledgements

We thank the respondents at Kilwa and Bagamoyo for their support during data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All the participants gave informed consent before participating in the study. Ethics approval for this study was granted by the Human Ethics Committee at the University of Dar es Salaam.

2 The question was ‘Do you have access to the MCH resources, including oceans, the built heritage, forest resources?’ YES or NO. If If the answer was YES, a follow-up question on how they accessed them was asked. If the answer was NO, a question on why they did not have access to them was posed to them. Another question was ‘What do you think are the main constraints hindering you from accessing them?’ The respondents provided correct answers to the questions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, under the competitive research and innovation grants for 2020–2021 [grant number COHU-AYH20116].