When you find yourself admiring images or footage of rare creatures, do you ever wonder what’s involved in protecting them? Leading the fight against wildlife crime are the world’s wildlife rangers, military-style anti-poaching patrol units for whom conservation is a full-time commitment. In biting cold and searing heat, they cover vast wilderness areas, seizing animal traps and keeping watch for illegal hunting and other suspicious activity. Most of their number – close to 90 per cent – are men. However, as natural communicators and protectors, female rangers tend to punch above their weight.

South Africa’s Black Mambas are a prime example. They’re the not-so-secret weapon of the 62,000-hectare Balule Nature Reserve. As a Big Five reserve situated in an accessible location, Balule has always been vulnerable to poachers. However, the all-woman Black Mambas ranger unit has turned its fortunes around. They patrol the fringes at dawn and dusk, with remarkable success, and run an environmental education programme for local school kids.

“We are the eyes and ears of the bush,” says unit sergeant Nkateko Mzimba. “We don’t carry guns, just pepper spray, because our job is to gather intelligence and act as a deterrent. This leaves the armed rangers free to concentrate on guarding the animals inside the reserve. If we detect an intruder, we call for back-up.”

Prior to the Black Mambas’ formation in 2013, would-be poachers would enter the reserve every day. “We’ve reduced intrusions by 89 per cent,” says Mzimba. The tough circumstances surrounding Covid-19 haven’t dented their record. To date, the pandemic has claimed relatively few lives in rural Africa, but its indirect effects have been catastrophic. With international travellers largely absent from the safari heartlands, there have been fewer safari vehicles at large and fewer tourist dollars coming in, resulting in an upswing in both opportunistic and organised poaching. But Balule has weathered the storm, thanks in no small part to the Mambas.

Mzimba believes that female rangers bring crucial skills to the job. “Women are better at keeping a secret”, she says. “Gathering intelligence is an important part of our work. When men are off duty, relaxing with their friends, they can be tempted to talk too much and say things they shouldn’t. I think women have more self-control.”

It’s a formula that’s beginning to play out in other parts of Africa. In Zimbabwe, the all-female Akashinga unit patrols elephant poaching hotspot Phundundu, while Kenya’s first women’s unit, Team Lioness, covers Amboseli.

The Black Mambas have become powerful role models within their community and have won awards for their efforts towards the Protection of Wildlife, but British campaigner Holly Budge of conservation initiative How Many Elephants feels units like these deserve far greater international support. To this end, she is launching World Female Ranger Day on 23 June 2021. “This new annual event will celebrate these women, while highlighting the significant gender imbalance in environmental conservation”, says Budge. “We’ll be collating gender-specific data about female rangers, to identify their needs.”

As Black Mamba ranger Leitah Mkhabela puts it, “We cannot do it by ourselves. We need more eyes, more people helping us.”

Author: Emma Gregg, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Bull elephant banner image – Jan Fleischmann/ Wikimedia Commons, other images Ian Godfrey Getty images for Lumix, 3DE Studios
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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In Uganda’s Bidi Bidi, the second largest refugee settlement in the world and home to about a quarter of a million people, cutting trees for brick-making and firewood has resulted in one of the world’s highest deforestation rates. As the country loses 2.6 percent of its forest cover every year, the search for sustainable solutions is urgent. Enter Interlocking Sustainable Soil Bricks (ISSB) technology, a cost-effective, environmentally sustainable alternative to burnt bricks. Made and installed on-site, these make construction cost-effective, efficient and environmentally friendly, believe engineers from international humanitarian charity Mercy Corps.

Cut to 2019, when Mercy Corps’ BRIDGE program funded by the UK’s Department for International Development engaged Haileybury Youth Trust (HYT) to employ ISSB technology to construct two innovation centres in Bidi Bidi. They trained ten women and 16 men in all aspects of construction from foundations to roofing, with a special focus on this new technology. This training has boosted the income and confidence of trainees and ensured they spread the technology further. Florence, a refugee and HYT trainee says, “I’m now able to buy clothes for the children and change the diet at home and hope to regain something of what we lost in South Sudan.”

Initially, many doubted the strength of these bricks; testing has proven them durable and sustainable. Today, the Mercy Corps projects using the ISSB technology have saved 45 tons of firewood, the equivalent to 72 tons of CO2 emissions, and HYT-funded water tanks using the same technology have saved 9.4 tons of firewood, the equivalent to 16.8 tons of CO₂ emissions. In 2017 HYT won an Ashden Award, an honour given to leading green energy solutions, for its vital role in using innovative solutions to climate change, poverty alleviation, and community resilience. HTY has gone on to work with and complete ISSB construction and training projects for partners such as Enabel, Mercy Corps, Children on The Edge, Build Africa, Street Child Uganda, African Revival and Catholic Relief Services.

HYT officials say they will soon have an expert team of refugee and Ugandan graduates in Bidi Bidi that are capable of building using ISSB with minimal HYT involvement and replicating the ISSB technology in other settlements. Already, seven Mercy Corps trained graduates have returned to South Sudan to implement ISSB technology and further train others to use it. Others have gone on to use ISSB technology in housing for their families, hairdressing kiosks and poultry houses. 

“We are confident ISSB will become mainstream in the coming years when it is coupled with an environmental construction policy and spear-headed by more professionals, including architects, engineers, environmentalists, and other stakeholders,” says Edmund Brett of HYT Uganda.

Author: Esther Nakkazi, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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“How many lives has this purse saved?” says Isatou Ceesay, 48, toting a pretty, pale blue woven handbag.

Raised in Njau, a humble village in The Gambia, from a young age Ceesay was struck by the environmental degradation caused by the overuse and poor disposal of waste. The rivers in her rural region of the West African state were clogged with plastic bags, with the burning or dumping of toxic waste leading to a host of health implications for her fellow villagers, from respiratory illnesses to cholera, as well as sickening the livestock communities depended upon.

“The idea of recycling came to me very young, when I looked at the environment I lived in and people didn’t have the idea of taking care of their waste, “Ceesay says. “People were simply not aware of what I was talking about.” But Ceesay had social barriers to overcome in making the villagers understand the benefits of good environmental custodianship. “I was very young, I lacked money and I was uneducated,” Ceesay says. “But one thing I did have was commitment.” Plus, she adds, with a smile: “I wanted to prove them all wrong.”

What a difference two decades make. Today Ceesay’s revolutionary community recycling project, Njau Recycling and Income Generation Group (NRIGG), employs 1,100 people in four separate communities in the Gambia. The project proceeds on the basis that many of the items that are poorly disposed of by Gambian communities have reuse value. Using novel crafting methods, NRIGG employs marginalised women to make recycled bags, mats, purses and jewellery for resale at markets or via the charity’s site from reclaimed items, including plastic bags, and the plastic bottles that are the scourge of local waterways. The organisation also trains unemployed women to be community waste and recycling experts, training villagers in composting and recycling, kitchen gardening and the societal benefits in planting trees. This advocacy work, Ceesay says, has improved child and maternal weight and wellbeing in the communities her organisation works with. “When I return to a village and see there are vegetables growing, the environment is clean and nutrition has improved, that’s the best thing for me,” Cessay says.

NRIGG is now turning its attention to forest preservation, perfecting a simple method of making compacted cooking fuel from discarded kindling and coconut shells to prevent deforestation for charcoal. “This is important,” Ceesay says. “Without forests we cannot have a healthy life.”

For Ceesay, social justice goes hand-in-hand with good environmental stewardship. “If women and young people are not part of this work it will not have a future,” she says. She has recently launched a project that gives recycling work to disabled Gambian women who otherwise have little option but to beg. “They are some of the best workers we have,” she says, “but society sees them as having no worth.” Now Ceesay’s dream is to see more women taking leadership positions in African countries. “That is something we are really lacking,” Cessay says.

Apart from Ceesay, of course. In 2012, the environmental trailblazer was recognised with an award at The International Alliance for Women Difference Maker award in the USA. In her homeland, she’s popularly nicknamed the Queen of Recycling, a moniker she doesn’t mind one bit. “When I wake up every day I still have the heart to deliver a better life,” she says.

Isatou Ceesay was photographed for Climate Heroes, a documentary series about the women and men around the world who fight to protect our environment and mitigate climate change, climateheroes.org.

Learn how to recycle plastic bags into purses with Njau Recycling’s technique: Watch Here
Buy their creations at  One Plastic Bag

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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