Chapter IV. The Ecosystems of Eastern Africa and Implications for TBNRMAs

A. Introduction

Eastern Africa is a major repository of global biodiversity—in the arid lands of the Horn, in the oceans, in the lakes, in the closed forest ecosystems, and perhaps best known of all, the savanna mega-fauna (Stuart and Adams 1990).¹¹ This chapter describes these ecosystems, concentrating on two that are lesser known but nevertheless have important transboundary linkages: The closed forests of Eastern Africa and the arid communities of the Horn of Africa.

Other ecosystems are described elsewhere in the literature—the extensive miombo woodlands are described in books on Southern Africa TBNRMAs (e.g., Cummings 1999), and for Tanzania by Rodgers (1996). The savanna grasslands, housing the renowned Serengeti Mara and Amboseli PAs, are described in the case study on the Kilimanjaro Heartland in this volume. This Regional Overview provides limited descriptions of other areas such as Lake Victoria and other freshwater systems.

This region has high global priority and national opportunity for biodiversity conservation, as demonstrated in the large portions of land designated as protected areas and in the form of game reserves and national parks. Tanzania has almost 39 percent of its land area, Uganda has more than 27 percent of its land area, and Kenya has over 10 percent of its total land area as designated protected areas. Many of these are transboundary in nature (Zbicz and Green 1997). Table 4 provides basic statistics.

Note: Protected Areas cited here include all natural resource management areas—including hunting areas that are outside IUCN categories I–VI.
Source: McNeely et al. (1994).

1. Biodiversity

Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania form an East African mega-biodiversity region with a great diversity of landforms, ecosystems, and wild species of flora and fauna. Eastern Africa overall has more than its fair share of global biodiversity riches. There are several reasons for this.

First is the extent of biogeographic diversity. Eastern Africa is at the junction of several major biogeographic regions (White 1983) (see Map 6 at the end of this document):

• The semi-arid and arid Somali-Maasai regions in the north;
• The savanna Sudanian in the northwest;
• The wooded (miombo) Zambezian in the south; and
• The forested Guinea-Congolian in the far west.

The second reason is the diversity of land forms (see Map 4):

• The high mountains, snow caps and afro-montane forests;
• The coast and marine systems;
• The freshwater Great Lakes; and
• The alkaline Rift Valley Lakes.

The third is the patterns of geological change and stability:

• Old block faulted mountains of great stability and recent volcanic mountains;
• Recurring climate change—alternating between arid-cold and wet-warm; and
• Land-bridges, lakes drying, and so on.

And the final reason is the history of ethnic and cultural diversity in the region:

• Pastoralist, agro-pastoralist land use systems; and
• Agrarian peoples of many types, and hunter-gatherers.

There are thus many natural and human-made factors that contribute to this diversity. This biological diversity is not evenly distributed in all natural communities and areas of the region—some are much richer in diversity and endemism than others. The developing field of conservation biology recognizes these special areas as “biological hot-spots.”

2. Biodiversity hot-spots

Where are these hot-spots? There are at least 10 in the region; 5 of them (the first five shown below) are forest areas, and many are TBNRM sites (see Lovett and Wasser 1992; Pomeroy 1993; Myers et al. 2000).

• The Eastern Arc block-mountain forests of Kenya and Tanzania (Taitas, Usambara, Uluguru);
• The coastal forests of Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania (e.g., Arabuko, Shimba, Rondo);
• The Albert Rift Valley forests in Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, and Tanzania;
• The Ethiopian Mountains, with closed forest and dry alpine communities;
• Dry mountains with cloud forest, bordering the Red Sea (Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia);
• The Great Lakes for Cichlid fishes—in Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika, and Nyasa;
• The marine coral reef ecosystems of the Red Sea and Western Indian Oceans;
• The ecosystems of the alkaline Rift-Valley Lakes—Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania;
• The arid Acacia-Commiphora thickets of northeast Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia; and
• The grassland savannas for large mammals, the Serengeti-Mara system.

The Eastern Africa Region is thus extremely rich in biodiversity, and biodiversity is the one major asset that Eastern Africa has a comparative advantage in. There are potential advantages in a developing tourism industry, and in a sustainable agricultural base.

B. The forest cover of Eastern Africa

Mention of forest resources in Africa makes people think of the Congo Basin, not Eastern Africa; Eastern Africa is home to savanna wildlife, not forests. But in terms of diversity of forest communities and strict localized endemism, Eastern Africa is an extremely important forest locality. This may seem puzzling. After all, all countries of Eastern Africa have less than 2–3 percent forest cover—as opposed to the over 60 percent in Congo. Much of the answer is hidden in Frank White’s work on the Vegetation of Africa. White (1983) separated Africa’s forests into two broad types: Low Africa and High Africa. In low Africa, forests are continuous, widespread, and similar. The forests of Eastern high Africa are associated with the areas of higher rainfall such as mountains or moist valleys (see Map 6). The forest patches are typically small in area, and differ in structure and in species composition both among patches and within patches. They are highly variable—even 10 kilometers apart. These species differences lead to considerable levels of local endemism.

It is the closed forest resources that are of greatest biodiversity interest, not the more widespread woodland or bushland systems. While the miombo woodlands of the Zambezian region discussed by White (1983) (see Map 6) has high internal endemism (i.e., you rarely find a miombo species in a forest or in dry bushland), these species are very widespread in the miombo itself. Species common in west Tanzania are nearly all found all the way to Zimbabwe.

Frank White’s classification of African vegetation recognized several Eastern African forest vegetation types. MacKinnon and MacKinnon (1986) used this classification in their assessment of the status of Eastern African vegetation. Despite the fact that forests cover only a small part of the region, and have received relatively little attention from a biodiversity conservation perspective (as compared to several national parks for large mammals), they are important for the populations of plant and animal species they support. This importance is often forgotten within national political processes, as for example in Kenya’s recent declared intention to degazette some 10 percent of gazetted closed national forest. Of the 1.7 million ha of gazetted forest reserve in Kenya, 82 percent occur in the afro-montane zone, 12 percent in western Kenya, and 5 percent in the coastal area. The remaining 1 percent occurs in small isolated patches on hilltops and where there is groundwater.

1. Priority forests for conservation in the Eastern Africa region

As a start to prioritization processes, attempts have been made to rank specific regions, in Africa and elsewhere, by the richness of their flora and fauna. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) produced a general overview for African forests in 1992 (IUCN 1992). The overview is summarized in Table 5. Later sections in this chapter describe three forest areas that have TBNRM connotations.

Note that Tanzania is mentioned six times, Kenya and Uganda three times, Ethiopia two times, and Somalia once. Eastern Africa’s importance in terms of biodiversity is evident.

Other prioritization processes are outlined below.

(a) Levels of Endemism. The book, Putting Biodiversity on the Map (International Council for Bird Preservation 1993) describes “Endemic Bird Areas”—or places of great importance for bird biodiversity. Eastern Africa has six entries, all of which are transboundary in that they include more than one country:

• Ethiopian Highlands (Ethiopia, Djibouti)
• Albertine Rift Valley (Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi)
• Kenyan Mountains (Kenya and North Tanzania)
• Serengeti and Environs (North Tanzania and South Kenya)
• Coastal Forests (Kenya and Tanzania)
• Eastern Arc Mountains (Tanzania and Kenya)

(b) Species Richness. Several publications attempt a ranking based on species richness. Table 6 demonstrates the great importance of Eastern Africa in overall continental terms, based on data from these sources (see Pomeroy 1993). The first figure is the absolute number of species in the country. The second is the ranking in Africa, based on species per area—which results in small countries with high numbers of species to come out on top. East African countries have lots of 1s, 2s, and 3s.

2. The Eastern Arc forests of Kenya and Tanzania

The term Eastern Arc is used to describe the chain of old block faulted mountains that stretches from just inside Kenya (the Taita Hills) across the border though the Pare Mountains, East and West Usambaras, Ngurus, Ukagurus, Ulugurus, Mahenge massif, and Udzungwa Mountains of Tanzania. The Volcanic Mountains—e.g., Mt. Kenya, Mt. Kilimanjaro—are not part of the Eastern Arc. International interest in the Eastern Arc forests started in 1978, when a workshop was convened at Amani in the Eastern Usambaras to write a report synthesizing the biological values of the forests, and drawing attention to the deteriorating status of the forests (Rodgers and Homewood 1982). A second workshop was held in 1997 (Burgess and Nummelin 2000).

The Arc forests consist of three levels of variation, with regard to endemism:

• Separate mountain blocks—e.g., Taitas, Ulugurus, Ngurus, East Usambaras;
• Separate forest patches within the blocks—e.g. Mtai, Lutindi forest reserves in East Usambaras; and
• Forest communities that are distinct in each forest patch, because of altitude, moisture, and because (a) over 60 percent of all Tanzanian endemic plant species are in the Eastern Arc, and (b) over 25 percent of Eastern Arc plant species are endemic.

The Eastern Arc Mountains have high rainfall and are of importance in national terms for water gathering (the Ulugurus support the Ruvu River to Dar es Salaam, the Usambaras support the Sigi River to Tanga). They are important as sites of cash crop agriculture—tea, coffee, cardamom, etc. There is considerable demand for such land. This demand has led to pressure for deforestation. Much non-reserve forestland has been converted in the last 20 years; and there has been and continues to be illegal encroachment. Estate agriculture can bring further problems. Tea estates need fuelwood to dry the tea, and felling natural forest prove the easiest option for some. Estate workers bring families and need cultivation land, more forest is cleared, and so the cycle goes on. As non-reserved forestland has been cultivated, there has been a consequent decrease in the availability of wood products—fuelwood, building poles, and timber. Such shortages have led to illegal off-take, especially in the face of reduced field management and protection capability. High intensity mechanical logging in the 1970s and 1980s caused great environmental harm to the East Usambaras. Such felling on public forestland led to the conversion to annual cereal crops, and total loss to the forest estate. The subsequent ban on commercial mechanical logging led to increased local level pitsawing—with little control on amounts, species, size classes, or site selection. Donor-supported forest management inputs have alleviated the situation in some areas.

3. The coastal forests of Eastern Africa

What are the coastal forests? At first this seems like an easy question, with an obvious answer: “They are the forests of the coastal strip of Eastern Africa.” Tanzania’s Tropical Forest Action Plan divides the country’s closed forests into four separate blocks (Burgess and Clarke 2001):

• The mangrove forests of the salt water coasts;
• The forests of the mountain systems;
• The forested bits in between—i.e., “the coastal forests”; and
• The others—e.g., the Minziro swamp forest, riverine forest.

The coastal forests of Eastern Africa epitomize the difficulties of maintaining biodiversity values in the tropics, in that they show virtually all of the conservation problems faced by conservation planners and protected area managers. The coastal forests (according to Burgess and Clarke 2001) have the following features:

• Small and highly fragmented, many (>150) separate forest patches, most of them under 500 ha in size;
• Surrounded by impoverished rural communities with a high demand for forest resources;
• Individually distinctive, high local forest endemism, and several different communities;
• Without the national-level “hard” resources, such as timber or water catchment, that would allow species resources to piggyback on their continuation; and
• Still very little protected by government agencies.

What does this mean? It means that forest conservationists:

(a) Cannot decide which of the 150 forest patches are essential, or of high or medium priority for biodiversity conservation. What criteria should conservationists use to make such decisions? How do we weigh up the different priorities between a small degraded patch of high biological value and a larger, less damaged patch that has less biological value?

(b) Cannot devise a realistic core-buffer zonation strategy, where the edge can be used to provide resources to people, and the center is maintained as a more inviolate refuge. With patches that may be of a hundred hectares, there is no space for internal buffer zones.

(c) Cannot sell the concept of conservation to rural people because of essential water conservation properties. Nor can they sell it to national governments because of the obvious large-scale commercial timber value. It may be that these small patches are going to be the only set of natural resources that will need some level of strict policing to maintain biodiversity values.

At the heart of providing answers to these problems is the need for information. WHAT are the specific values of WHICH forests? WHAT is their status? HOW are these values used, and by WHOM? Only when we have this knowledge will we be able to start the planning of a comprehensive conservation scheme for the coastal forests of the region. Today our efforts, vital as they are, are only ad hoc attempts. Coastal forests are a transboundary resource shared by Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique—and all of these three countries share an obligation for their conservation (see Rodgers in Burgess and Clarke 2001).

4. The Albertine Rift forests of Uganda

The Albertine Rift Valley forests exist as a string of now-separate forest patches ranging from, in Uganda, Budongo in the country’s west central area southward through Hoima, Kabarole, and to the Kibaale district; through Rwanda and Burundi; and finally to Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo on either side of Lake Tanganyika. While some patches are cross-border forests (e.g., the Bwindi-Mgahinga-Virunga area, Rwenzoris, etc.), others are national in character. Some globally important forest national parks along the western borders of Uganda have donor support—e.g., Bwindi and Semliki.

The Albertine Rift Valley forests are recognized among the world’s top 200 ecosystems of extreme global importance for biodiversity conservation as the “Earth’s Most Biologically Valuable Ecoregions” (Olson and Dinnerstein 1998). They have great global significance because of the following:

• They host many endemic species, across all taxa, several of which are rare;
• They contain a high species diversity of plants, animals;
• They have a wide cultural diversity of human-forest interactions; and
• They act as carbon sinks and regulating climate conditions.

At a national level, these forests are important sources of timber. Budongo, for example, is the largest mahogany (Entandophragma, Khaya) forest in Eastern Africa, but it is currently under enormous pressure from pitsawyers. Note that developing Forest Management Plans, a stronger forest institution (e.g., the Uganda Forest Authority), etc., will be able to exert much greater pressure on such activities. These forests also have more localized community values. It has been noted that many people have some direct dependence on the forests for products such as fuelwood, water, medicine, vegetables and fruits, honey, bush meat, building poles and thatch, and craft materials. The forests protect water catchments, regulate water supplies and prevent natural disasters that may be caused by flooding. The forests maintain soil fertility for agriculture and regulate microclimate; and provide cultural and aesthetic values that are important to rural people.

5. Forests of significance as transboundary management areas

Apart from learning lessons about conservation best practice, the closed forests of Eastern Africa offer several examples of more specific TBNRM sites (see Table 7).

C. The arid and semi-arid ecosystems of Northeastern Africa

Unfortunately only a fragmented literature exists for these ecosystems, being based on past British, Ethiopian, and Italian (in the case of Somalia) sources. These sources are divided into vegetation, wildlife, and pastoralist sectors, without meaningful overviews. White (1983) provides a useful vegetation bibliography, but of his 19 pages over half deal with three well-studied sites in Eastern Africa: Tsavo, Serengeti, and Marsabit. White calls the driest area of Eastern Africa the “Somalia-Maasai Regional Centre of Endemism” (Map 6). There are some 2,500 plant species in the Somalia-Masai Centre, of which half are endemic, and there are about 50 endemic genera. Within this there are great concentrations of endemic species typical of the dryland tropics, including Acacia (30 spp), Commiphora (60 spp), Boscia (7 spp), Boswellia (6 spp), and Maerua (10 spp). Many of these center around the Ogaden area (see Box 6).

Most of the area is low-lying, below 1000 m. altitude, and rainfalls are all below 500 mm. per year, some as low as 50 mm. Temperatures are high and there is a major evaporation deficit. Rainfall occurs in two poorly defined seasons—making cultivation difficult in any one season. Such an ecological regime emphasizes the importance of wetter islands: the mountains such as Marsabit in north Kenya, or De in Djibouti, and the river systems flowing out of the Ethiopian highlands through the dry lowlands (see Box 9 on water issues).

Vegetation is varied, most is a deciduous thicket and bushland. This grades into more evergreen communities on lower mountain slopes, and to bushed sparse grassland where rainfalls are exceptionally low. White (1983) describes several plant communities:

• Acacia-Commiphora deciduous bushland and thicket;
• Somalia-Maasai secondary grassland and wooded/bushed grassland;
• Somalia-Maasai semi-desert grassland and shrubland; and
• Somalia-Maasai edaphic grassland, including shallow and flooded soils.

Overall the Acacia-Commiphora is the most extensive vegetation type; typically it is a dense bushland that grows to 5 m., with spinous vegetation. Better sites may have trees up to 8–10 m. and therefore approach a woodland condition. Cover and species composition varies greatly, depending on fire, elephant usage, and human use and clearing. Grasses are not prominent where bushland dominates, and include a few species of annuals (e.g., Aristida spp). Increased elephant use (as in Tsavo National Park in the 1960s and 1970s) leads to loss of woody cover and increased grassland. Where cattle are infrequent, fires are common and will suppress woody regrowth. The Kilimanjaro Heartland case study in this volume discusses the elephant and fire pressures on vegetation in Amboseli National Park.

The Somalia-Maasai Regional Centre grades northwestward into the adjacent Sudanian Regional Centre, in western Ethiopia, Sudan, and western Uganda. This has wetter communities with wooded grassland dominated by Terminalia and Combretum trees, over a more conspicuous grass layer. In the west the two centers grade into the Lake Victoria Regional Mosaic, described by White as “a meeting place for five floras: the Guinea-Congolian, Somali-Masai, Sudanian, Zambesian and the Afromontane. Its vegetation consists of a mosaic of floristically impoverished variants of the first four, with isolated afromontane forest patches.

Both case studies that follow this Regional Overview are part of the larger arid/semi-arid ecosystem described here. The Minziro-Sango Bay case study is within the Lake Victoria Regional Mosaic and the Kilimanjaro Heartland case study is within the Somali-Maasai Regional Centre.

Pastoralism is the dominant land use in the Somali-Maasai region, and much of the Sudanian region as well. Browsers (camels and goats) are of increasing importance in drier areas. The Lake Victoria Regional Mosaic with rainfalls between 700 and 2,000 mm. per year has a higher population density with varied land-use systems from dense cultivation (Buganda) to agro-pastoralism (Sukumaland in western Tanzania). A major form of land use in all regions is wildlife conservation—where the focus has been on the large mega-fauna. See Gichohi et al. (1996) for a fuller description of the savanna ecosystem as a whole; and Sinclair and Arcese (1995) for detailed analyses of the Serengeti Ecosystem.

Wildlife conservation, which excludes livestock from protected core areas, is in considerable conflict with pastoralist land-use practices. This is exacerbated where the smaller areas of drought grazing land, such as valley bottoms and mountain slopes, are appropriated for poor subsistence cultivation (maize, sorghums, and millet) and larger commercial holdings (the beans farms of northern Tanzania). Homewood and Rodgers 1992 discuss this potential for conflict in the Ngorongoro area; Brockington and Homewood (1996) do the same in the Mkomazi part of the greater Tsavo-Mkomazi transboundary ecosystem. The Northeastern African region contains many of Africa’s most well known Wildlife Protected Areas, and since several of these are in border areas they are or have the potential to be Transboundary Natural Resource Management Areas (see global listing in Zbicz and Green 1997). The major areas are listed in Table 8.

Despite the large amount of land established as wildlife protected area in the region, the state of much of the region’s wildlife resources is perilous. Map 5 shows the distribution of elephant, a species of conservation interest, as estimated for 1975 in Eastern Africa (Kingdon 1979). If we look at the cross-border linkages today, we see that the elephant population along the coast is almost gone, elephant numbers in Tsavo have been poached to 20 percent of past levels, and those of Mkomazi are nearly extinct. The elephant links from Amboseli to Kilimanjaro and Monduli are tenuous (see the Kilimanjaro Heartland case study). Elephants have disappeared from the Natron, Magadi, and Nguriman area. The Serengeti-Mara population is still viable but has been halved by poaching. The Minziro-Sango Bay case study shows the Minziro population to be almost zero. The elephant is now absent from Rwanda, and from Kidepo in northern Uganda.

The concern here is twofold. First, the establishment of big Protected Areas with lots of funding and support was the main paradigm for conservation. But in the face of commercial demand for products, it failed for years owing to insufficient political will and political involvement in illegal off-take. The black rhino went extinct over much of its range. Norton-Griffiths (1998) documents a decrease of 50 percent of Kenya’s large ungulates over a 20-year period until 1995; this a slow but steady decline of some 3 percent per annum, at a time when livestock numbers and off-takes went up.

Second, TBNRM is not only about specific areas, it is also about cooperating in regional species’ (and communities’) survival strategies and action plans. There are such plans for the rhino and the elephant. CITES and other international conventions attempt to give such strategies adequate teeth. But the bottom line is political will. And the big question is: how much wildlife biodiversity is enough? What proportion of land should be a Protected Area?

Recently more strategies and action plans have been developing: from plants in general (with special ones for succulents and orchids) to equids, cats, canids, primates, rhino (Emslie and Brooks 1999), etc. These are all regional strategy initiatives, and TBNRM is a part of them.

D. Freshwater ecosystems

Box 9 introduces the range of transboundary water resource activity. Many issues involve conflict over the sharing of water—an increasingly scarce resource in Eastern Africa.

Lake Natron—Flamingos and the Rivers Mara and Ewaso Ng’iro

The southern Ewaso Ng’iro river has its head waters at the slopes of the Mau Escarpment in Kenya. The river flows south through the Rift Valley pastoralist dryland areas of the Kajiado district before flowing into Shombole Swamp and into Lake Natron and Tanzania. The Southern Ewaso Ng’iro River is the main tributary into Lake Natron; tiny springs supplement this flow. Lake Natron is a closed drainage system and highly alkaline, as freshwater evaporates and leaves high salt concentrations. Sodium bicarbonate concentrations in all these Rift Valley lakes, including Natron are crucial for the abundance of blue-green algae, which is food for the lesser flamingo.

Perhaps the most famous of the birds in Lake Natron are the flamingos. There are two species: the greater (300,000 birds) and the lesser flamingo (three million). These birds are found throughout the African Rift Valley lakes. Lake Natron is the only known breeding site for the lesser flamingo, and even there conditions are so variable that breeding episodes occur only every five years or so. Lake Natron acts as a nursery for the lesser flamingo, where every so often over half a million chicks are reared and have to walk (too small to fly) to freshwater springs and inflows. Fluctuations in water levels from the springs and the Southern Ewaso Ng’iro will have a critical impact on the bird life in the lake.

TBNRM processes came into play when a power project in Kenya was designed, planning to take water from the Mara River some 25 km. or so west of the upper reaches of the Ewaso Ng’iro (see Box 9). This plan would increase freshwater flows into Lake Natron (and if there happened to be increased agriculture as a result of more water, chemical increases would take place as well). Also, the decreased water-flow down the Mara would affect the Mara Serengeti wildlife in the dry season, and greatly reduce opportunities for dry-season irrigation in the Musoma areas of Tanzania. Water extraction would be at its greatest need level in the driest months—which means extraction at that time of the year, and not annual water transfers, would become the limiting factor. (There is no need to move much water at peak flood times.)

Flamingos move (millions at a time) for two reasons: first, to find breeding conditions and second, and more frequently, to find good feeding conditions. Changing water depths, salinity, and alkalinity affect the algae, which prompt the flamingos to move. This is why tourists can see a million birds at Lake Nakuru National Park one week and almost none the next week. Flamingos have always moved this way—it is not something new. There are perhaps four key lakes and another four “second-leaguers.” The key sites are Lakes Nakuru and Bogoria in Kenya and Natron and Eyasi in Tanzania; in the second category there are Lakes Elementeita and Magadi (Kenya), and Manyara and Ngorongoro (Tanzania). This erratic movement has meant that no one was quite sure how many flamingos there really where for a long time. In 1995 an East African GEF project and IUCN Eastern Africa organized a simultaneous aerial count of all the lakes in one day. It turned out there were some 3.5 million of these birds.

Coordinated resource monitoring is also part of TBNRM. Since then IUCN and WWF have organized planning workshops for monitoring flamingo habitat, numbers, and movements. But the bottom line is that it is only Tanzania and Lake Natron that provides breeding habitat; if Natron is degraded, no more flamingos. The Kenya power project has been put on hold indefinitely, and it took the strength of the EAC Environment Committee to broker joint discussion meetings.

This example and that of the Lake Victoria water hyacinth issue suggests the need for Regional EIA mechanisms. Box 10 addresses this in more detail, but the crux of the issue is that regional activities need strong national foundations (see Scandiaconsult Natura et al. 1999). Uganda has strong national EIA legislation, but neither Kenya nor Tanzania has such a legal process, despite years of trying. Regional EIA therefore lacks a national mandate.

13. In Kenya the EIA-implementing agency is the National Environment Secretariat (NES), in Uganda it is the National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA), and in Tanzania it is the National Environmental Management Council (NEMC) and the Department of Environment, both within the Vice President’s Office.