Who Should Practise Adr? Accreditation of Alternative Dispute Resolution Practitioners in Tanzania and Lessons From Kenya

Accreditation is the gate through which practitioners of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) enter paid practice in Tanzania. Since 2021, reconciliators, negotiators, mediators and arbitrators have been accredited under regulations made under the Civil Procedure Code. This article examines whether these accreditation criteria uphold the professional standards of ADR practitioners, using Kenya as a comparative jurisdiction. It uses a qualitative comparative legal design that combines doctrinal analysis of legislation and case law with empirical data. Interviews and questionnaires were administered to forty purposively selected respondents drawn from the Judiciary, the Ministry of Constitutional and Legal Affairs, the Office of the Attorney General, the Tanganyika Law Society, the Tanzania Institute of Arbitrators, the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (Kenya Branch) and Dar es Salaam Tumaini University. The article demonstrates that the Tanzanian criteria favour professional status and length of experience over proven competence, offer no route for specialised mediation training, have been applied so as to exclude qualified non-advocate lawyers, and are weakly supported by renewal, monitoring and disciplinary mechanisms. Kenya, by contrast, accredits mediators on the basis of assessed training, practical experience and continuing development. The article proposes competence-based amendments to the Tanzanian regime and stronger institutional supervision.