By Kate Barrett

People and wildlife are living in harmony like never before thanks to a unique collaboration off the coast of eastern Africa on the island of Zanzibar.

A longstanding partnership between the humanitarian organization CARE and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is enabling an ever-expanding number of human communities and the animals that live in them to flourish.

Since the mid-1990s, WCS and CARE have been working in complementary ways to help the Zanzibar Department of Commercial Crops, Fruits and Forestry (DCCFF) manage the island’s resources.

While WCS aims to safeguard the region’s biological diversity, CARE focuses on helping people who live there generate income from various projects that allow them to sustainably use and manage their natural resources.

Today, the groups have more formally merged their projects and built upon them with help from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF).

“What the CEPF grant has allowed us to do is go back and look at this work that was done, look at lessons learned, and then to expand this to a larger portion of the island,” said Kirstin Siex, the project’s director at WCS. “We both have our own strengths. It’s been a really nice partnership in that sense. We both really bring something different to the table.”

Tourism Benefits for All

Zanzibar has changed significantly since Siex first started working there in the early 1990s.

To the delight of the government, tourists have increasingly flocked to the islands of Unguja and Pemba, collectively known as Zanzibar, just beyond mainland Tanzania. Many have come to Zanzibar’s first national park, Jozani-Chwaka Bay National Park, to see the exquisite, yet Endangered red colobus monkey (Procolobus kirkii). Although 18 taxa of the red colobus monkey live in Africa, one particularly distinct species is found only in Zanzibar.

But the influx of tourists has not been confined to the national park alone because nearly half of the island’s wildlife lives on community land.

CARE, WCS, and their government partner therefore had an interest in ensuring that the eight communities surrounding Jozani would benefit from protecting the monkeys. With their assistance, Zanzibar’s government developed a revenue-sharing scheme that would allow those villages to benefit from tourism. As a result, the monkeys once considered a nuisance are now a source of both income and regional pride.

“It’s a nice example of where the communities saw economic benefits from protecting their forests,” Siex said. “That really instilled in the communities right around Jozani this kind of conservation ethic.”

A Successful Partnership

In 2005, both CARE and WCS were ready to take their success to the next level. To do so, each applied for a grant from CEPF – separately – to expand their work to additional communities beyond Jozani.

Instead of considering their proposals independent of one another, CEPF Grant Director John Watkin encouraged the organizations to formally collaborate.

“One started from a scientific perspective, the other started from a people perspective,” Watkin recalled. “We wrote back to them both and said, ‘Ok you’ve both been working there forever, you both have value, and you need to work together to pull off the project.’”

WCS and CARE did just that. Today, more than a year and a half into the project, they are celebrating impressive results.

With CEPF support, the eight communities near Jozani are now working far more independently while WCS, CARE, and Zanibar’s government expands the projects to eight additional villages, bringing the total number to 16. The groups are also working to develop a seventeenth project on Uzi Island in a community extremely interested in conserving its natural resources.

Reconciling conservation and economic development, villagers are generating income from several enterprises based on non-timber forest products from which they can make sustainable livings. Signed agreements between communities and the government empower people living in these areas to manage their land.

Among many projects, CEPF support to CARE helps villagers run a bee-keeping operation. Making honey is not only an environmentally responsible operation, but the product appeals to consumers worldwide.

At the same time, WCS helps communities manage the wildlife living on their lands. With support from CEPF, WCS trains two members of each community to track and monitor wildlife like the red colobus and Endangered Aders’ duiker (Cephalophus adersi), and record data about their region’s flora and fauna.

This year, WCS brought together WCS, CARE, and DCCFF staff to discuss how to use the data collected to manage land most effectively. The groups have also made significant strides in facilitating community inclusiveness on forest and wildlife resource management.

“Our collaboration with WCS has been so successful because we all work under the same roof, we share the same project areas, the same partners—we are working for the same project goal,” said Amour Bakari, CARE Tanzania’s Zanzibar area representative. “We normally have regular meetings to discuss progress, constraints and ways forward together with our partner and community organizations working with the project.”

Though CEPF funding is scheduled to end in December, work in Zanzibar will continue. WCS and CARE aim to reduce illegal activities like poaching by 50 percent by December 2009, and, in the same time frame, increase by 50 percent the number of community members benefiting from conservation.

“Fostering such partnerships is the essence of what we hope to achieve in supporting projects on the ground,” Watkin said. “Sometimes it’s an uncomfortable marriage, but sometimes it’s like E-harmony. You find that match.”

For more information, contact:
- Amour Bakari, CARE Tanzania’s Zanzibar Area Representative, Abakari@care.or.tz
- Kirstin Siex, Africa Program Assistant Director and Zanzibar Project Director, Wildlife Conservation Society, ksiex@wcs.org; +1-718-220-5887