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ENVIRONMENT: To Build a School, Save the Hippo

Julio Godoy

BARCELONA, Oct 7 2008 (IPS) - As the Wechiau community living along the banks of the Black Volta river in Ghana discovered, looking after the hippopotamus can build schools and bring electricity.

Back in 1998, the 17 farmer and hunting communities of the Wechiau had no schools, drinking water or electricity. Now the 10,000 or so from the Wechiau have them all, thanks to a decision to preserve the environment for the hippopotamus population.

The Wechiau simply agreed back in 1998 to create a hippopotamus reserve. "Very soon, we started to reap some gains from the project, especially from tourism," Chielinah Bandanaa, leader of the Wechiau community, who is attending the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, told IPS.

"With those gains, and the support of our development partners from the industrialised world, especially in Canada, we could then build schools, drill holes for drinking water, and even install solar panels to generate electricity."

The hippopotamus sanctuary is home to more than 500 animal species, and to numerous medicinal plants. It is managed by a board representing the Wechiau communities. Wechiau children now enjoy scholarships from income from the reserve.

Bandanaa received the Equator prize, an international award given to outstanding local efforts along the Equator to reduce poverty through conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. The prize is given by the Equator Initiative, a coalition of civil society organisations, businesses, governments, and communities, together with the United Nations.

Erika Harms, executive director for sustainable development at the United Nations Foundation, told IPS that such projects are "humbling and inspiring examples of what grassroots communities are doing along the Equator, to preserve biodiversity and simultaneously alleviate poverty."

Harms said the Equator Initiative's work is based on the simple fact that "the world's greatest concentrations of biological wealth are found in the tropics, in countries that also have some of the highest levels of poverty.

The Wechiau community was among 25 groups awarded the Equator prize for 2008. Other prize-winners were indigenous groups from Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Ecuador in Latin America, from the Solomon Islands, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Micronesia, Indonesia, Vanuatu and Cambodia in the Asia Pacific region, and from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Kenya, Senegal, Namibia, Tanzania and Ghana in Africa.

The Community Development Centre (CDC) in Sri Lanka won the Equator prize for preserving traditional vegetables, especially yams and tubers. The project was launched in Aranayaka in the Kegalle district in south-eastern Sri Lanka by Damayanthi Godamulla back in 1996.

"Since then, we have rediscovered 58 varieties of very nutritious, tasty yams and roots that our ancestors used to grow, and which had almost disappeared from the daily diet of our communities," CDC member Achala Adikari told IPS.

Over the past 12 years, Adikari said, more than 800 farmers have joined the group to grow traditional, rediscovered yams and tubers. "We do not use chemical additives in our agriculture," she said.

The newly rediscovered vegetables have not only enriched the diet of the Aranayaka communities, but brought food security. "These yams and tubers are available all year around," Adikari said.

In addition, sales have brought a new source of income for the communities. "Now we want to establish a research and training centre to facilitate the expansion of the project, as well as the market for traditional seeds," Adikari said.

Another award winner was a cotton-weaving project in Peru. In 2004, 25 craftswomen from Mórrope in the north-western Lambayeque province launched a project to preserve the native, traditional variety of cotton.

"We also wanted to rescue our ancestral weaving handicraft from disappearing," project representative Magdalena Puican Chinguel told IPS. Women in the region weave with local tools they carry around their waist.

"In the beginning our husbands looked upon us as if we were crazy," Puican Chinguel told IPS. "But very soon, when money started to pour in from our handicrafts, they realised we're right."

Government agencies joined the project, putting together training courses and financially supporting supplementary schemes such as water sources for agricultural purposes and for drinking.

"Now, women from Mórrope are generating their own income, and contribute to the general development of the province," Puican Chinguel said.