Most of the current developmental projects in Tanzania on natural resources has been established basing on their national/macro-economic impacts and environmental impacts with little attention to the understanding of the nature/ways of lives of the local community. We understand that lately there has been a movement of resource rich countries to incorporate local content component in their policies so that local people can really benefit from the sector. Tanzania is not an exception following its local content policy as featuring in the Petroleum Act of 2015, which put forward that; a maximum engagement of local content and local participation in the development of the oil and gas industry is important to ensure optimum benefits to Tanzanians. The major gas developments involves offshore platforms, a substantial supply to send materials to the platforms, a terminal to receive the gas, and an LNG plan with export facility. These are all large projects with local content implications at the construction stage and the ongoing operations stage.
The main objective of this study is to find ways in which Local community can benefit from the opportunity offered by their natural resources in this case the Oil and Gas (as stipulated by the Tanzania natural gas policy, 2013). The study has found that, the local participation and the local capability on average is very low with the earlier on average being only about 17 percent. Secondly, the perceptions and the expectations of the local people was very high, however, only about 8 percent have been met. The social corporate responsibility by the oil and gas companies seems to be very diverse between Mnazi Bay and SongoSongo. Fourthly, migration and emigration seems to be insignificant both in Mnazi and SongoSongo. Lastly, fishing and agriculture are still the dominant economic activities in the oil and gas resources. However, none of these seems to supply the output to the oil and gas related industries.The main policy implication emanating for the study is the fact that there is a need to reconcile the local participation and local capability for Mnazi and SongoSongo, while both seems to be very low on both gas discoveries sites, but they also seems to be very diverse
