Since the last post we’ve conducted two fieldwork trips to Lobeke National Park. Fair to say it’s pretty out of the way – three days by 4X4 on mud roads ridden with muddy ravines in the rainy season and clouds of dust in the dry. But for this reason the area is pretty special, monkeys playing and peering down at you even in villages and around the base camp, gorillas commonly spotted along the tracks of forest, elephants meandering around as they please.
The abundance of animals and tight controls on community activities through the conservation service has however certainly created problems – local communities and particularly the Indigenous Baka hunter-gatherers have great fear of entering the forest due to rangers on patrol and so do not have access to the quantity and diversity of forest produce they rely on. That the farmed food that they are now increasingly encouraged to produce is regularly ravaged by monkeys, gorillas, porcupines and elephants leaves them trapped with little ability to get the nutrition they need.
In recognition of these (and other) issues, and to support the management of Lobeke as a One Health landscape, we have co-created Sapelli participatory mapping projects with five villages from the northern tip after Salapoumbe right down towards Moloundou and Kika on the Ngoko river border with Congo. These villages were chosen because they have strong Baka communities and because during consultation they showed genuine interest and a passion to take up the project.
Furthermore, the geographic locations of these villages are important in relation to the activities the other partners in this IN.FOR.BIO project will lead: high potential disease transmission (Helmholtz Institute), a great need of healthcare (Project Bwanga), and suitable for support with agriculture and agroforestry (IITA/CBI).
Sapelli is an icon-based app we developed, free on the Google Play Store, enabling communities to map whatever they want even if they can’t read or write. Building on the work of colleague Fabien Moustard, the Sapelli projects amongst the five Lobeke communities feature six categories of things which the communities can monitor and report:
1) Natural resources
2) Animals and carcasses
3) Poaching
4) Human-wildlife conflict
5) Human rights abuses
6) Sacred sites
Following the Extreme Citizen Science methodology, we aim to maximise participation and involvement from the beginning of project design all the way through to data visualisation and utilisation. This is not necessarily an easy task in communities where the concept of data and maps cannot be translated into local tongue and the vast majority of the population are non-literate. However, through enacting the 8 Steps of Sapelli we’ve reach high levels of participation.
I’m particularly proud that all the facilitators carrying the project on the ground across the Lobeke landscape and in a coordination role in Yaoundé are Baka themselves. We are working towards a project by Baka for Baka, even if right now total data sovereignty is not realistic.
As detailed in the 8 Steps of Sapelli above, we form a Community Protocol with each community team (made up of up to 4 men and 4 women per village). Central to the protocol is who the data should be shared with and to what effect. Discussions around this, including separate consultations with stakeholders, has led to the recognition of key recipients of the data including the local rep of the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Baka organisation ASBABUK, the Conservateur of Lobeke National Park, and the Helmholtz Institute for One Health. Visualising the data back to the communities is essential and really hightens their motivation in the project – how else do they know that the data they’re collecting really exists?
Building on all this geolocated data is the vision to assist in the establishment of two ICCAs (Territories of Life) which will help communities to maintain access to their forest, safeguard their spiritual and cultural heritage, develop economic activities to support their wellbeing, and showcase their ability to monitor and protect their forest from threats, securing high biodiversity. These will be forests of life, benefitting the health for all the beings that inhabit them.
This project is part of the IN.FOR.BIO initiative working on One Health across Cameroon and CAR. More info here
