Equitable Payments for Watershed Services (EPWS) — Uluguru Mountains, Tanzania

The Uluguru Mountains in Tanzania's Morogoro region are the source of the Ruvu River, which supplies roughly 90% of Dar es Salaam's water. Between 2008 and 2012, CARE and WWF piloted an Equitable Payments for Watershed Services (EPWS) scheme in the Kibungo Juu ward, paying farmers in five villages (Lukenge, Kibungo, Lanzi, Dimilo and Nyingwa) to adopt sustainable land-management practices — agroforestry, fanya juu and bench terracing — across roughly 2,240 hectares of farmland to cut soil erosion and nutrient loss into the river.

The Dar es Salaam Water and Sewerage Corporation (DAWASCO) and Coca-Cola Kwanza Ltd acted as service buyers, committing US$100,000 and US$200,000 respectively over four years — a rare example of a public water utility and a private beverage company jointly funding upstream conservation to protect a shared water source.

A peer-reviewed quasi-experimental evaluation (Environment and Development Economics, using propensity-score matching across 116 participants and 117 non-participants) found EPWS payments contributed about 20% of participating households' cash income (averaging US$11 per farmer), alongside significant indirect gains in crop yields, livestock ownership and land values; 77% of participants received training versus 16% of non-participants.

The same study found that rising land values after terracing made land less accessible to the landless poor. A post-pilot governance handover to a multi-stakeholder steering committee for scale-up was documented as an intention, but independently-verified evidence that this expansion or continuation actually occurred beyond the original pilot was not found, so the scheme's long-term durability remains unconfirmed.

Read the full analysis: https://weadapt.org/knowledge-base/adaptation-in-mountains/equitable-payments-for-watershed-services/