Travel Blog

This project intended to change the trend and turn poachers to farmers for the production of food and surplus for sale an effective ground for conservation education and sensitisation. Each year communities in different associations save seeds to plant for the next season from what they have grown a sustainable element to keep the project benefiting and on going.

The main objective of the project is to create an alternative means to local people around gorillas’ national park with an alternative livelihood that will absent them from poaching of wildlife and degradation of mountain gorilla habitat.

Meetings and sensitisation from the beginning

It is very important right from the beginning to involve communities and to let them make definitive decisions for themselves. This serves a two fold; to empower communities to leed the management of the project, and to let communities understand the concept and to link this to conservation.

To this end therefore, several meetings were held among local communities about the project. During the meetings, communities identified different constraints and how to deal with them for the project to bear the targeted profits. During the meeting the Chief Park Warden, Law enforcement and community conservation warden of the Parc National des Volcans talked to communities and highlighted the need to work together and safe guard the endangered species; the mountain gorillas (gorilla beringei beringei).

During the meeting, communities elected their leaders who would make a follow up and link the projects in all the communities and make sure they all work and get the best results. Groups who had put down their poaching tools to become conservation volunteers were divided into groups.

Given the positive effect this has had on community’s livelihood and conservation, as evidenced by park wardens, communities decided to hold conservation education on the grass-root level to inform other community members of their target after renouncing poaching habits.