WildAid believes community engagement, empowerment and stewardship is central to successful conservation. Only if communities benefit from living alongside wildlife -- and have agency to help manage land and natural resources -- can conservation work to the benefit of humans and animals.
At WildAid, we want to change the narrative from “human-wildlife conflict” towards “human-wildlife coexistence” and “interdependence”.
Tanzania
Gabon
In Gabon, WildAid works with Conservation Justice and Brainforest Gabon to mobilize communities living within and alongside forests to take action to conserve natural resources.
We educate forest-adjacent communities about laws and regulations, about their rights and responsibilities, about sustainable resource use and about conservation. The aim is to help communities benefit from their environment in a sustainable manner, and to foster community pride in preserving natural resources, so that environmental crimes gradually become socially unacceptable.
Working with the government of Gabon, we are also in the process of establishing a nationwide toll-free reporting hotline to allow these communities to report environment crime and suspicious activity in their forests.
Cameroon
Ebo Forest is located about 60km from Cameroon’s largest city Douala. Stretching over 1,500 square km, it is the most functionally intact ecosystem in the Gulf of Guinea forest region. Not only is it home to 40 communities who have been living off its resources for decades, it is also considered the most important place in Cameroon for botanical research, providing shelter to diverse and endangered fauna such as gorillas, forest elephants, drill monkeys and a rare species of Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee, who are the only known chimp population to both crack nuts and fish for termites. Ebo Forest also holds roughly 35 million tonnes of carbon making it a site of global importance for combating climate change.
This has made Ebo forest a rich target for its resources - particularly wood. In 2020, the government of Cameroon government opened up part of the Ebo Forest for logging. This would not only have resulted in the catastrophic loss of habitat for many endangered species, but also for the communities who depend on the forest for food, water and medicine and access to important cultural and ancestral sites that lie within it.
Thanks to a global outcry and local and international media coverage, the decree was swiftly reversed. However, the threat to Ebo remains. Without sustained media coverage and publicised government commitment, it could quickly fall off the public’s radar, and face new threats.
In March 2021, WildAid launched a national media campaign including videos, billboards and social media to rally public and political support for keeping Ebo Forest free of commercial exploitation and instead allowing for sustainable land-use management. Our goal is to increase awareness about the risks of re-opening Ebo to logging and other destructive activities, provide local communities with a platform to air their viewpoints and give them a voice in deciding Ebo’s future, as well as to bolster support among Cameroon's urban population for keeping Ebo Forest (and others just like it) protected.