Capacity Strengthening for Local Government Policymakers in Kinondoni (Dar es Salaam) and Chemba (Dodoma)

Women and Social Protection (WSP) is implementing a project for enhancing the skills and capacity of Local Government Authorities (LGAs) at village, street, ward and district levels in Kinondoni and Chemba Districts to better understand, implement, and advocate for policies related to Social Protection (SP), Gender Equality (GE), and Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE). The prime objective is to ddress capacity gaps for LGA policymakers on micro and macro policies and legal frameworks relating to SP, GE, and WEE. Building on successful training experiences from Ikungi District (pilot phase), the project adapts proven strategies to new contexts, empowering local officials who are closely connected to their communities to identify and support marginalized individuals and groups more effectively.

The project intervention will target 3,785 LGA policymakers as beneficiaries, including representatives from Police Gender Desks, across Kinondoni and Chemba districts, with gender and intersectional representation recorded during participant registration. Starting with Kinondoni and from the main intervention sample for both districts, about 1,810 participants across all 20 wards and 106 streets of the Kinondoni Municipality will receive skills and capacity strengthening training. Likewise, the intervention addressing LGA policymakers’ capacity gaps through participatory skills training is also similarly be implemented in Chemba comprehensively with a target to reach all 26 wards including 114 villages within its jurisdiction. This programmatic outreach envisions to engaged a total of 1,975 LGA officials. The core objective of this intervention is to rectify key knowledge gaps pertinent to SP, GE and WEE, thereby fostering a system of inclusive, accountable, and gender-responsive governance at the LGAs level.

Through this program, WSP embeds a ‘Scaling Deep’ intervention strategy that envisions fostering macro and micro policy transformation within the SP, GE, and WEE context, from initiation, formulation, and enforcement at the LGA level. Engaging rural (Chemba) and urban (Kinondoni) contexts helps reflect diverse experiences, focusing on building local leadership and sustainable LGA systems with GE, SP, with gender and intersectional data recorded for administrative and advocacy purposes. Lessons learned from this initial phase will inform the future scalability of the intervention to other Tanzanian districts, contingent upon empirical insights and the availability of financial resources.