Pulse of Conservation: CTPH’s Health-Powered Gorilla Journey
In the 21st century, how do ecotourism and conservation efforts coexist without harming one another’s interests?
Since the early 20th century, tourism and conservation have coexisted, the link between tourism and conservation is being expanded upon and improved upon by ecotourism. Enhancing the sustainability standards, it expands on the notion of employing tourism to support conservation and vice versa. Therefore, ecotourism was designed by conservationists in the 1980s, at the dawn of sustainable development, to channel tourism revenues into support for conservation and local development. Despite ecotourism having many definitions, it has one distinct set of principles. It is an alternative to other forms of tourism development, designed to ensure a positive feedback loop between tourism and conservation while addressing both social and environmental goals.
What are the key benefits and outcomes of the Gorilla Conservation Coffee (GCC) initiative?
Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) established GCC as a social enterprise to improve the livelihoods of the communities surrounding Bwindi Impenetrable National Park by assisting them in getting international market prices for their coffee and training them in sustainable coffee farming and households income improvement. The initiative has created an international market for smallholder coffee farmers in Bwindi which they would not have gotten, subsequently getting a premium price. GCC helps to preserve the endangered mountain gorillas by providing sustainable financing for their protection by giving farmers a viable alternative livelihood through coffee farming; which in turn reduces their need to poach and collect fuel wood taking the pressure off the gorillas and their habitats, and helping to reduce human-wildlife conflict and cross-species disease transmission among the major threats to wildlife conservation.
How has Uganda championed the causes of gorilla conservation efforts, and where is there room for improvement and reforms on a national level?
Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) is mandated to ensure sustainable management of wildlife resources, and has worked with partners to ensure gorilla conservation efforts, but also to educate local communities and people from all over the world about the value and benefits of protecting these endangered species, and keeping them for future generations.
Saving gorillas in the wild is a complex and difficult task, but certainly within our hands and each of us has a role to play, from policymakers down to consumers.
In partnership with UWA, CTPH has put a lot of effort in protecting all the 25 habituated gorilla groups in the Bwindi landscape from threat. First, by improving gorilla health through regular health monitoring of habituated gorilla groups; second, by improving community attitudes to gorilla and forest conservation including reducing illegal use of the forest for poaching and harvesting of timber and non-timber forest products; and third, by improving their conservation practices through promotion of clean energy where we have started with energy-saving cook stoves, soil and water conservation and sustainable agriculture. As well, CTPH has increased support for gorilla conservation both in local and international communities. For improvement and reforms at the national policy level, a lot more input is required to address the negative impact of environmental degradation and to allow citizens to be put in the best position to make a positive change to protect their habitats and environments.
As CTPH approaches its 20th anniversary in 2023, what has been the organization’s greatest achievement and its biggest setback, and how are these experiences shaping CTPH’s future direction?
After realising the need to holistically prevent and control the human/wildlife/livestock cross-species disease transmission in protected areas of Uganda, CTPH has implemented a One Health approach at Bwindi, which has been further scaled to other landscapes in Uganda and gorilla-protected areas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
CTPH set up one of the first One Health field programmes in the world to promote conservation and in the process has established an award-winning scalable and sustainable model of Village Health and Conservation Teams. We find that as community health and conservation practices are improving, gorillas are falling sick less often from diseases in the local communities such as scabies and giardiasis. We are also excited that this One Health has improved community attitudes to gorilla conservation because we are addressing their health, a basic human right.
CTPH successfully launched the Policy Brief on Responsible Tourism to Great Apes at the inaugural Africa Protected Areas Congress (APAC), in Kigali in 2022. This was coauthored with International Gorilla Conservation Programme (IGCP) in collaboration with the Africa Civil Society Organizations biodiversity alliance (ACBA). The policy highlights the key challenges and threats facing Africa’s endangered great apes which include gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
We are excited to have published Walking with Gorillas, a memoir and charter about of my conservation and leadership journey shaped by One Health that came out in March 2023 and thus far, has been official launched in five countries: The US, UK, Uganda, South Africa and Kenya and also available in Canada and Rwanda and others through Amazon and other platforms.
