Tanzania Is Sitting on Gold. Here Is What the Communities Around It Need Next.

Uchumi360 | Investigation Tanzania's mining sector is one of the most significant on the continent. Gold, diamonds, tanzanite, nickel, the country's mineral endowment is vast, and over the past decade, deliberate policy reforms have strengthened the framework for managing it. The Mining Act 2022, local content regulations, and mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility plans represent a serious institutional commitment to ensuring that mining delivers broad-based development. The question the sector now faces is not whether the framework exists. It does. The question is how to close the remaining distance between policy intent and lived community experience. A 2026 field research report by HakiRasilimali, a Tanzanian civil society organization focused on transparency and accountability in the extractive sector, takes a close look at that distance. The report, Towards Sustainable Mining in Tanzania, studied Barrick's Bulyanhulu Gold Mine in Shinyanga through the lens of the Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) standards, a globally recognized accountability framework. Its findings are instructive not as an indictment of any single actor, but as a practical map of where mining companies, regulators, and communities need to go next. The gap is not between Tanzania's laws and global standards. It is between what is reported at the corporate level and what communities actually experience on the ground. What the Research Found The HakiRasilimali team conducted 35 key informant interviews across Kakola No. 9 and Lwabakanga villages, both adjacent to the Bulyanhulu mine. They also analyzed Barrick's published sustainability reports, Tanzanian mining legislation, and international accountability frameworks. What they documented is a dual reality. On one side, Barrick has made genuine contributions to the surrounding communities. The mine built Lwabakanga Primary School, village dispensaries, and improved local roads. It created local security employment through the Sungusungu initiative. In response to water concerns, a water supply system was installed in Kakola No. 9. On the other side, community members described persistent concerns about dust from mine trucks affecting respiratory health, blast vibrations causing cracks in homes, and uncertainty about water quality. Residents reported limited access to monitoring results and a sense of distance from the mine's decision-making processes. "The mine has provided us with employment, built schools and a dispensary, and improved our roads. The mine has also built a water system for us, but there's only one tap for the whole village." — Community member, Kakola No. 9 That last detail, one tap for an entire village, is the kind of gap the report is really about. The infrastructure exists. But it was designed to a scale that does not match the actual need. Good intentions, improperly sized, do not deliver good outcomes. The Self-Reporting Problem Barrick publishes annual sustainability reports aligned with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The company is a member of the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), which sets standards on tailings governance, water stewardship, and biodiversity protection. By conventional measures, Bulyanhulu is an operation with credible sustainability commitments. The challenge the report identifies is structural: both ICMM and GRI rely primarily on self-reporting and company-provided data. Independent third-party verification is limited in frequency. The result, as researchers and global practitioners have noted, is space for a gap between what sustainability reports say and what mine-site communities experience. At Bulyanhulu, Barrick's sustainability reports indicate that participatory water quality monitoring involves community representatives in sampling and reviewing laboratory results. But field interviews found that those results do not consistently reach the wider community. Residents described harvested rainwater containing dark particulates and expressed uncertainty about borehole safety. Whether those fears are chemically verified or not is secondary. The primary issue is that no communication loop exists to address them. Similarly, Bulyanhulu has maintained a Biodiversity Action Plan since 2021. Yet field observations noted limited vegetative cover around the mine site, an opportunity, the report suggests, to better align on-site landscaping with the company's stated restoration commitments. "There's hardly any direct consultation between the mine and us in the community. As of October 2025, there hasn't been a single meeting where we, the community members, were directly involved. All meetings are held between the mine and our local leaders." — Community member, Kakola No. 9 The Engagement Bottleneck Barrick's community engagement model at Bulyanhulu is structured around a Community Relations Officer (CRO), who serves as the primary link between mine management and the surrounding villages. Community concerns move upward through village leaders and local government, which relay them to the CRO. The report describes this as a centralized model. It is administratively efficient. But it creates what researchers call a bottleneck effect: information is filtered through a small number of intermediaries rather than flowing directly between the mine and the broader community. Community members feel the distance. The physical location of the CRO's office, inside the mine's secured perimeter, reinforces this. Residents who want to follow up on a complaint must navigate mine security protocols to do so. For many people in adjacent villages, that is not a minor inconvenience. It is a real barrier to engagement. The report also notes that some community members were unaware of the formal grievance process entirely, suggesting that outreach about available recourse channels needs to be significantly more proactive. A grievance mechanism that communities do not know about, cannot physically access, and receive no feedback from is not a grievance mechanism. It is a filing system. The TSM Model: What Tanzania Can Learn The Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) framework was developed in 2004 by the Mining Association of Canada. It has since been adopted in Finland, Botswana, and several other countries, and it offers a distinctive approach to mining accountability. Where ICMM and GRI measure performance at the corporate level, TSM measures at the mine site. Every mine is assessed annually against standardized protocols covering community relationships, tailings management, water stewardship, biodiversity conservation, Indigenous and community outreach, and climate change. Those assessments are independently verified every three years, and the results are published in a standardized format that allows direct, public comparison across operations. In Canada, TSM has strengthened community engagement and improved tailings governance. In Botswana, it has advanced water stewardship in a water-scarce context. The mechanism works because it pushes accountability down to the operational level to the actual mine site, not the corporate headquarters. The HakiRasilimali report argues that Tanzania does not need to adopt TSM wholesale. But the framework offers a practical model for something Tanzania already values: making good mining practice measurable, verifiable, and transparent to the communities it affects. A Path Forward The report's recommendations are specific and actionable, directed at both mining companies and the institutions that support them. On community engagement, mining companies should move toward a more decentralized model, one that facilitates direct, periodic engagement with the broader community, not only village leaders and local government structures. The CRO office should be located outside the mine perimeter, so community members can raise concerns and receive feedback without security barriers in the way. On transparency, water quality monitoring results should be disclosed directly to affected communities. Not just to regulatory bodies, but to the people whose health depends on what those results show. Blasting vibration assessment results should be communicated to residents in accessible formats, with context that explains what the findings mean for local building conditions. On local content, mining companies and the Ministry of Minerals should jointly conduct sensitization programs that clarify what local content means in practice — who qualifies, what opportunities exist, and what skills communities need to compete for goods and services contracts. Local Content Plans should include community capacity building as a specific requirement. On CSR design, infrastructure built under corporate social responsibility commitments must be scaled to actual community need. A school is a genuine contribution. A water system with one tap for an entire village is a contribution that needs to be completed. On accountability frameworks, adopting TSM-style site-level performance assessment, with annual measurement, independent verification, and public reporting, would give Tanzania's mining sector the kind of ground-level accountability that corporate-level frameworks alone cannot provide. Tanzania's path forward is not to import external benchmarks wholesale. It is to use them as a reference point for building something better — and locally owned. Why This Matters for Tanzania's Mining Ambition Tanzania has made a clear choice to leverage its mineral wealth for national development. That is the right choice. The country's mining sector contributes significantly to GDP and government revenues, creates employment, and attracts foreign investment that builds infrastructure and supply chains. But the DRC produces over 70 percent of the world's cobalt and remains among the poorest nations globally. That is the extreme version of a problem every resource-rich country must actively work to avoid: mineral abundance that does not translate into broad-based social development. The distance between extraction and benefit is not closed by law alone. It is closed by accountability structures that reach the people closest to the operations. Tanzania is not the DRC. Its institutions are stronger, its governance trajectory is more positive, and its reforms over the past decade have been meaningful. But the lesson from Bulyanhulu is that strong frameworks at the national level need to be matched by strong accountability at the mine site. When community members in Kakola No. 9 and Lwabakanga say they do not know what is in their water, do not know if their homes are structurally safe, and have never been directly consulted about decisions that affect their daily lives, that is not a small operational issue. It is a signal that the sector's accountability architecture needs to go deeper. Tanzania has the will and the framework to close that gap. The research now exists to show exactly where to start. *This article draws on HakiRasilimali's 2026 report, Towards Sustainable Mining in Tanzania: An Examination of Policy and Practice Dimensions of Responsible Mining, authored by Irene Minja and Irene Mosha. Uchumi360 covers business, investment, and economic policy across Tanzania and East Africa.