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Improving university-community collaborations for sustainability in Tanzania

Professor Tristan McCowan (UCL Centre for Education and International Development) used UCL-Wits University Strategic Partner Funds to explore community-university engagement for sustainability.

Scenic mangrove forest with lush foliage and ocean

23 May 2025

Climate change, sustainability challenges and the ecological crisis are global, complex issues that urgently need solutions. A combination of expertise and insights is required to adequately address these problems, and this requires effective collaboration between many people and organisations. While universities have a key role to play in terms of research and expertise, communities have key knowledge and ideas that need to be a central part of the process too.

From 2020 to 2024, Professor Tristan McCowan led the Climate-U project, funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), which aimed to strengthen the contribution of universities to address climate change. This involved university partners from seven countries and focused particularly on lower-income contexts. This work evolved into the Climate-U Network, which now has more than 20 university partners. To build on some of the work done through the project, Professor McCowan successfully applied for the UCL-Wits University Strategic Partner Funds, to generate knowledge and insights into university-community collaborations in a village in Tanzania.

Learning from a community in Tanzania

“The current global ecological crisis is a very complex one. It’s a practical issue, but it’s also very knowledge driven,” Tristan explained. “We're only going to be able to solve climate change and the other environmental and social problems with a really strong evidence base, and collaboration between different actors. The relationships between universities and communities is absolutely central to that.”

The goal of this particular project was to understand how universities and communities are currently collaborating on sustainability issues, and how relationships like these can be improved in the future. To do this, the teams from UCL and University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) partnered with Dar es Salaam University College of Education (DUCE). Focusing on the issue of coral reef and mangrove destruction in the coastal village of Somanga in Tanzania, the university collaborators worked with a community organisation that was doing some innovative work in restoring the coral and mangroves. 

“There are tangible environmental and livelihood threats for fishing communities because of the coral and mangrove destruction, not to mention the coastal erosion this causes,” Tristan explained. “The community initiative in Somanga is making a difference. So we carried out some research to investigate why this initiative had been so successful, particularly in terms of the interaction between the different actors involved, including some researchers from DUCE.”

The team was particularly interested in the movement of knowledge between different people and communities. “There’s the scientific, more formal knowledge in the university space, and the more informal, local knowledge – or indigenous knowledge – in the community space,” Tristan said. “There are often a lot of barriers to working effectively between those different forms of knowledge and different communities.” They identified four different types of individual in this kind of work: intermediaries who enable access to knowledge, translators who help make sense of it, brokers who forge opportunities for co-production, and innovators that bring change at the local level.

Strengthening knowledge for the future

The project has been a success on different levels. Notably, the sustained engagement with the university-based researchers has been significant in strengthening capacity for knowledge mobilisation in Somanga. It means the community interventions – such as coral reef planting and learning mangrove restoration techniques – is better known throughout the community. The initiative has also brought wider awareness of the innovative solutions provided by this community, that can be of use for other coastal villages.

As a direct result of the partnership between UCL and Wits established by this funding, Wits has become a member of the Climate-U Network. “Wits comes with a lot of expertise in environmental work, environmental education, and more broadly in Africa,” Tristan said. This project has also led to another one, funded by the British Academy, to continue the work on coral and mangrove restoration in Somanga and a second site in Kenya. The focus of this project will be on how the knowledge gathered can be taken up in local and national policy.

“The UCL-Wits University Strategic Partner Funds has been absolutely critical,” Tristan said. “It’s important in a concrete way, because research costs money. But it’s more than that. It gives this kind of work recognition. It shows someone is valuing your work. This is really helpful when working with partners, particularly those in the Global South, where it is a real challenge for many universities to develop this kind of work. It’s enabled us to engage with some very talented researchers who have a lot to contribute.”

The benefits to Tristan have been profound. As well as contributing to forthcoming publications and expanding the Climate-U Network, he also valued learning about the dynamics of community organisations and their relationships with universities. “That was quite new to me,” Tristan said. “I also learned a huge amount from our Tanzanian and South African partners, both around the theoretical work and the specific contexts. Through the work, it's been very gratifying to see the strengthening of the Climate-U Network, which will hopefully continue to grow and be an important force for promoting this type of work in universities around the world.”

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