Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots began in which Tanzanian city?

Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots began in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The youth program was founded in 1991 after Goodall met with a group of local Tanzanian teenagers at her home in Dar es Salaam. The young people discussed environmental, animal-welfare, and community problems they had witnessed and wanted to address themselves.

Roots & Shoots developed from that meeting into a youth-led program built around practical action. Participants are encouraged to choose projects benefiting people, animals, or the environment, rather than seeing conservation as something done only by scientists or governments.

Dar es Salaam is Tanzania’s largest city and a major port on the Indian Ocean, but it was not the site of Goodall’s best-known chimpanzee research. That work took place at Gombe, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Arusha and Dodoma are also important Tanzanian cities, yet neither is the birthplace of Roots & Shoots.