Completed
Zanzibar, Tanzania · 17–21 August 2026
Zanzibar, August 2026
Zanzibar sits on one of the busiest maritime corridors in the western Indian Ocean. Its ports, airport and marine conservation areas are administered by separate authorities, each holding a piece of the same problem, and environmental crime moves through the gaps between them.
Over five days in August 2026, ATI convened 32 law-enforcement and government participants drawn from eighteen Zanzibari institutions for a multi-agency taskforce capacity-building programme, organised with the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation, Natural Resources and Livestock.
The programme treated environmental crime as what the evidence shows it to be: organised financial crime with an environmental target, requiring financial investigation, network mapping and prosecution-ready evidence rather than enforcement alone.
Environmental crime in the region is rarely a standalone offence. It is a predicate offence, the visible end of a chain that runs through document fraud, undeclared cargo, informal value transfer and laundering.
Investigations fail at predictable points: evidence collected in a way a court cannot accept, chains of custody that break between agencies, financial trails that are never followed because no one agency holds both the mandate and the technique.
The programme was built around those failure points rather than around subject areas.
Instruction ran alongside a case that participants worked continuously. On the final days they were divided into four groups, each developing and presenting a complete investigation built from a complex scenario: initial report, evidence requests, interviews, financial tracing and a case file capable of surviving a prosecutor's review.
In the closing evaluation, 92% of respondents (24 of 26) recorded that the programme fully met their expectations. Asked what they would change, the most common answers were to extend the session and add more practical exercises and case studies. Asked what they would do next, the most common answer was to apply the methods directly to live casework.
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The programme was organised by Zanzibar's Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation, Natural Resources and Livestock in collaboration with ATI, and held at Hotel Verde, Zanzibar.
It was sponsored by the Vranos Family Foundation. That sponsorship covered this programme; it is recorded here for that reason, and does not describe a standing partnership with ATI.
Twenty-eight enforcement, prosecution and revenue officers from Malawi, mainland Tanzania, Zanzibar and Zambia convened for practical training in investigative technique, evidence handling and port security inspection, working in four groups on a live case exercise.
ATI co-financed two formal policy instruments with Zanzibar's Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation, Natural Resources and Livestock: the Situational Analysis Report 2025, and the Zanzibar Unified Strategy for Natural Resources Security and Resilience 2026–2036. ATI also convened a multi-stakeholder training on natural-resources security for government participant institutions.
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