WILDLIFE PROTECTION PROJECT LAUNCHED (MIRROR, PAGE 35)

From Akwasi Ampratwum-Mensah,
Sunyani

A project, designed to educate communities along protected wildlife parks in Ghana, Canada and Tanzania on the need to conserve the parks and help reduce poverty in the rural areas, has been launched in the Brong Ahafo Region.
The five-year project, dubbed “Protected Areas and Poverty Reduction: A Canada-Africa Research and Learning Alliance”, was initiated by the International Community-University Research Alliance (ICURA), a group of university researchers from over 102 countries around the world.
The project will provide alternative livelihood activities to the people in the protected areas to help reduce their poverty levels and also build staff capacity to generate new knowledge that will be of direct use to local communities, academics and government agencies in the participating countries.
It is being funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the International Development Research Corporation (IDRC) at the cost of US$1 million.
In Ghana, the Brong Ahafo Research and Extension Centre (BAREC) at the Sunyani Polytechnic (S-Poly) will oversee a 16-month research work to be conducted in three sites, namely the Mole and Bui National Parks in the Northern and Brong Ahafo Regions respectively and the Keta Lagoon Complex in the Volta Region.
Furthermore, scholarships would be offered to each person selected from the S-Poly, the Faculty of Forest Resources Technology (FFRT) of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Sunyani campus and the Natural Conservation and Research Centre (NCRC) in Accra to pursue a PhD course at the University of Victoria in Canada.
A similar facility will be extended to the Tanzania programme, where research work would be conducted in the Serengeti National and Saadani National Parks.
Professor Kwasi Nsiah-Gyabaah, the Rector of S-Poly, who launched the project, observed that for many years, the government had developed several strategies to reduce poverty in the country but noted that, “One of the limitations of poverty reduction strategies is the wanton destruction of the natural resource base”.
“We have not recognised the importance of winning ways with wildlife and we still have not come to accept the role of wildlife and natural resources conservation in poverty reduction programme,” he declared.
Prof. Nsiah-Gyabaah pointed out that every year, large areas of Africa’s forests were illegally exploited for their valuable timber or cleared to make way for farmlands, while wildlife was hunted for meat or killed through indiscriminate bush burning.
Dr Grant Murray from the Vancouver Island University of Canada, a Director of the project, giving an overview of the project, mentioned four principal streams of the research to include benefits/cost of Eco-tourism and protected areas, human-wildlife interactions, governance structures and processes of decision-making and flows of information/knowledge mobilisation.