How people in Ghana are learning to profit in a win-win for wildlife too
Across the world, natural habitats are getting smaller and (or perhaps, as) human populations are getting larger. In 1900, Africa’s population is estimated to have been 140 million. It stands today at 1.4 billion, growing ten-fold in just over a century. By 2050, which is a lot closer than it sounds, Africans are predicted to represent one in every four people on the planet.
Conflict for resources from physical space to food, between us and the natural world has already led to everything from the loss of livelihoods to the loss of life. The most-accepted theory on the appearance of Covid-19 is that it broke the species barrier and jumped to humans in a Chinese ‘wet’ market selling live animals for slaughter.
In previous decades, dedicated protected wildlife spaces such as national parks, where hunting and human habitation are prohibited, were thought to be the answer. But they don’t ultimately solve the issue of the demand for space in particular areas. When placed without due thought, they can damage human cultures and decrease animal populations too.
In East Africa, Tanzania’s Maasai tribespeople were forcibly removed from the Serengeti, now famed for the Great Wildebeest Migration, when it was declared a national park by British colonial authorities in 1951, despite a human-wildlife coexistence spanning centuries. They were translocated to the nearby Ngorongoro Crater, where their descendants are now facing a similar battle as this area becomes ever-more popular with safari goers the Tanzanian authorities are keen to satisfy. Safaris are big business.
Ghana’s largest protected space, Mole (pronounced ‘Molay’) National Park sits in the dry north of the country. It was annexed as a wildlife refuge in 1958, immediately after the country’s independence from the UK the year before. Its upgrade to a national park in 1971 triggered a similar translocation of its human populations as occurred in Tanzania.
‘The last of five communities was moved from the park in 1992, the first in 1964’ Ali Mahama, Mole’s Park Manager, told me. They were moved just a few kilometres, to the boundaries of park, where studies have shown human-animal conflict tends to be at its worst.
A 2001 study by biologists at Canada’s University of British Columbia calculated a population of 170,000 people within 50 km of Mole. They include several hundred living in Mognori, a self-proclaimed ecovillage on the opposite side of a red dirt road from Mole’s unfenced boundary.
Previously reliant on foraging and subsistence hunting, ways of living which were now unavailable to them, the community turned to farming the staples of the region, including cassava, millet and sorghum.
My guide to the ecovillage, Latif, told me what happened next. ‘Elephants from Mole would come and eat the crops. Villagers said to the national park ‘we are going to kill these elephants.’ The national park said ‘you will go to prison’, which the villagers didn’t want.’
Instead, with the help of funding from international NGOs, which provided training to villagers on how to interact with international tourists, they began offering homestays, canoe journeys along the Mole River and village tours incorporating a stop at the local traditional healer. Along with his bags of ground barks for treating malaria and headaches is a ‘natural Viagra,’ also beneficial for back pain and hernias, should anyone need a convenient excuse for buying some.
The money raised by tourists visiting (the ecovillage not the traditional healer) is divided directly among the families taking part, with any profit going into a community fund. This has already paid for a village kindergarten teacher for the first time.
The model has been so successful, it’s being replicated further along the same road at Murugi Women’s Shea Butter Group, to create employment (and therefore much needed cash) by running guided tours of its shea butter production line.
The local chairperson Seidu Munaba walked me through the complicated extraction process, beginning with women harvesting fallen, organic, wild shea nuts in May, through to crushing, milling and boiling the nuts to produce a raw liquid butter that then solidifies on cooling.
‘We don’t know what happens to it next,’ admitted Munaba. Traditionally, communities across West Africa have used it for cosmetic purposes (which is why it’s a cash crop today), as well as frying foods and as an aid to healing the scarification tribal marks of newborns.
Despite Munaba’s admission, selling the shea butter provides work for 80 women, plus a handful of men who operate the heavy machinery. It takes two weeks to clear eight 50 litre sacks of nuts, working in rotation so as many people as possible have work. One 50 litre sack can earn them more than US$25, while the waste parts of the nuts are turned into fire briquettes, reducing the need to obtain fire wood from around the park for the village’s daily cooking needs.
It’s a mix of tourism revenue and shea butter production that have been integral to the success of Wechiau Hippo Sanctuary in Ghana’s far northwest, managed by 20 surrounding communities. Having tourists visit this out of the way area meant women no longer had to collect cowrie shells to sell from the banks of the hippos’ home in the Black Volta River, where conflict could easily arise between the human and hippo populations. Hippos being notoriously territorial over their grazing grounds and often described as the most dangerous animal in Africa.
It allowed the community to declare a core zone along the river’s eastern bank where farming was prohibited, providing the hippos the grazing area they need, while also protecting the physical and economic health of Wechiau’s people.
It may seem like on a planet of a limited size human-animal conflict is inevitable, but these three projects in Ghana have shown what’s possible with some lateral thinking and a little funding. Perhaps these are thoughts we can use in the UK, one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries.
Images: Ian Packham
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