Ngorongoro Conservation Area, photo by Dieglop, 14 October 2013, CCA-SA 4.0 license. 
An elephant walking across the street, tourist vehicles behind him. Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania, photo by Zenith4237, August 19, 2018, CCA-SA 4.0 license.
The lives of the Maasai people in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, in northern Tanzania are at risk – not through war or unavoidable ecological catastrophe – but because the UNESCO World Heritage system has failed to balance heritage preservation and human rights.
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area sits within prime pastoral country in the Arusha region of northern Tanzania. The conservation area includes vast areas of highland plains, savanna, woodlands, forests, and the enormous Ngorongoro Crater. The vast volcanic caldera, dramatic wildlife and human-fossil record earned it UNESCO World Heritage status in 1979. It stands next to the Serengeti National Park and its lands form part of essential wildlife migration corridors.
For generations, Maasai herding families have lived in and around the conservation area’s grasslands, moving cattle seasonally, drawing on communal pasture, maintaining cultural rituals and kin-networks.
Maasai, Sikolio boys, in Tanzania, photo by Dr. Ondřej Havelka, February 27, 2008, CCA-SA 4.0 license.
But since 2021, the Tanzanian government has rolled out a plan to relocate some 82,000 Maasai residents from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to a distant site in Msomera (Handeni district, Tanga region of Tanzania). The move is officially described as a “voluntary relocation,” but in fact, imposed through sometimes violent coercion. This is not the first time Masai peoples have lost access both to pastoral lands and to basic services like hospitals and schools. One Maasai woman at Endulen village told Human Rights Watch: “We are tired of moving.”
This relocation push comes at the same time as increasing tourism in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area; tourist numbers have risen from below 700,000 in 2018 to almost 850,000 in 2023. The twin pressures of conservation and commercialization have converged, with the Maasai caught in the middle.
The Mechanics of Displacement
Maasai woman carrying her baby, wearing traditional clothing and jewelry. Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, photo by William Warby, April 3, 2008, CCA 2.0 license.
Critics say that local authorities have structured the relocation process not by invitation, but by attrition: first, services are scaled down, then movement is restricted, then homes become untenable. According to Human Rights Watch, in 2022 the Endulen Hospital, a 110-bed hospital run by the Catholic Church since 1965, was downgraded to a dispensary, with chronic shortages of medicines. Schools in the area have deteriorated: permits for renovations withheld, latrines overflowing, classrooms overcrowded. Grazing areas for livestock have been closed off and movement through the conservation zone is now arbitrarily restricted by rangers demanding identification, imposing fees, or denying entry entirely. Local NGOs and civil society groups report that they have been blocked from access or their representatives monitored and followed.
For the Maasai, remaining in place becomes increasingly difficult and relocation starts to feel like the only option.
Families that relocate become part of a scheme in which they are given (for example) a three-room house, plus two to five acres of farmland. But the fit is poor for many Maasai households whose livelihood is communally based and pastoral.
Traditional Maasai families are often large, multigenerational, and multi-household. The space allocated to families in Msomera is not only far too small for the number of people in an extended family; it is considered improper, taboo, for multiple wives and their families to live closely together under Maasi culture. Families are also being broken up for this reason. The Tanzanian government grants decision-making authority about moving the homestead exclusively to the male head of household, and any wives or family members who do not want to move may be left abandoned and homeless.
Maasai Man, Tanzania, photo by Dr. Ondřej Havelka, February 27, 2008, CCA-SA 4.0 license.
Meanwhile, in Msomera, existing residents have found themselves labelled trespassers or squatters when the government allocated their land to the relocated Maasai. Tensions have flared: “They take our places, our farms, our homes,” said one resident. The redistribution of land has provoked conflicts not only with local residents but also among new arrivals, with police threatened and arrests made.
Rangers in the NCA have been documented beating residents for grazing animals outside restricted zones. In effect, the “new home” becomes a different kind of displacement: from ancestral lands to a settlement that does not match their cultural or economic realities, and which has internal conflict built into it.
Rights, Laws and an Agreement That Never Held
The Maasai in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area are supposed to be protected by Tanzanian law (including the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Ordinance of 1959, the Land Acquisition Act of 1967, the Land Act of 1999, the Village Land Act of 1999) and by international standards: the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the ICCPR, the ICESCR, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
Yet the government failed to consult Maasai communities meaningfully; dialogues with ministers were described as “we gave instructions” rather than genuine consultation. Human Rights Watch concluded that the relocation and resettlement processes have not only breached the legal framework applying to all but also reinforced gender inequality among the Maasai and the displaced residents of Msomera.
The Role of UNESCO — Eye-on-Heritage, Blind to People?
Migration, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania, photo Thomas Fuhrmann, September 7, 2015, CCA-SA 4.0 license.
The Ngorongoro area’s World Heritage status brings prestige and tourist money to Tanzania. But the site’s tourist appeal and thirst for funds has pushed site management to reshape land-use, severely reduce the number of residents, and convert a living culture into a ‘guest attraction.’
This is not a unique consequence of World Heritage status. At the Angkor Wat World Heritage site in Cambodia, the pattern is similar.
In 2023, Amnesty International reported that around 10,000 families in the Angkor Archaeological Park area were evicted and moved to distant, unsuitable jungle lands beginning in 2022 under the pretext of conservation; the agency reported threats, intimidation, inadequate housing and poor water and sanitation in relocation sites.
Maasai land and home, Tanzania, photo by Michelle Maria, 31 July 2013, CCA 3.0 license.
UNESCO responded, stating that it “did not request, support or participate” in the Cambodian government’s relocation program, and reiterated its opposition to forced evictions. In April 2024 an AP report confirmed that about 5,000 families have been relocated from the Angkor site in Cambodia to Run Ta Ek, with another 5,000 slated for relocation.
Critics view this as forced eviction rather than voluntary migration. The relocated residents not only lost access to their homes, medical services, access to transportation, and any means of earning a living – the Cambodian government also burdens the forced migrants with debts for the cost of the new, often inadequate homes provided to displaced communities.
Conditions have improved somewhat for those required to move; there is now a school and a basic bus service. Still, the families have lost far more than they gained and many have moved back somewhere nearer to Angkor Wat. The results in both Cambodia and Tanzania are similar: the heritage label justifies removing the living culture. Conservation programs plus tourism result in the fulfilling the state’s wishes and ignoring the people’s community rights.
The Economic and Political Drivers
A Maasai woman making bracelets at Mwenge, Dar es salaam, Tanzania, photo by Rwebogora, April 8, 2024, CCA-SA 4.0 license.
Tourism is a major revenue stream in Tanzania, as it is in Cambodia. The World Heritage designation enhances visibility and draws visitors whose numbers are continuously increasing. At the same time, emerging markets such as carbon-credit projects attach value to landscapes where human footprint is minimal. A Wall Street Journal article reported that tens of thousands of acres in Tanzania’s northern conservation zones have been incorporated into carbon-credit schemes, intensifying pressure on pastoralist land rights.
The same article notes that in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, authorities have argued that the growing Maasai population and their livestock are overwhelming the ecosystem and tourist experience. The result: administrative and legal frameworks that treat pastoralists as a “problem” to be relocated.
Preservation, Human Rights and the Way Forward
The story of the Maasai in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area reveals the serious fault-lines in how heritage is managed globally. When preservation is framed primarily as safeguarding a physical landscape or wildlife spectacle, the rights, livelihoods and cultures of resident peoples are often sidelined.
Maasai woman of Tanzania, photo by Gosberth, February 16, 2024, CCA-SA 4.0 license
The heritage norm becomes a justification for removal rather than inclusion of native peoples into historic spaces and natural landscapes. UNESCO’s administrative process begins with nomination and inscription as a World Heritage Site. It is supposed to be followed by monitoring and advisory missions to safeguard and preserve each site of “Outstanding Universal Value.” This structure has limited leverage when it is confronted with governments that give tourism and development first place on their agenda. The lack of binding human-rights conditions means the “how” of conservation often goes unchallenged.
If heritage is to be ethically preserved, the people who live in, rely upon and steward the land must be central, not supplementary. That means genuine consultation, obtaining real consent, and ensuring that there is continuous provision of services designed around cultural continuity.
The Maasai in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area are not against conservation or tourism; they are asking for a seat at the table and a future that does not erase their presence. Their displacement shows what happens when they are excluded. World Heritage inscription, while designed to safeguard “Outstanding Universal Value,” has too often enabled governments to monetize and control ancestral landscapes and minority peoples at the expense of the communities who inhabit them. Until UNESCO can accommodate both preservation and human rights, and has the courage to hold abusive governments accountable, places like Ngorongoro will stand as spectacles of injustice rather than for preservation of heritage.
