Walking with Gorillas
Healthy and thriving animal communities depend on healthy and thriving human communities. That’s the message from this week’s guest, Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, Uganda’s first wildlife veterinarian and founder of Conservation Through Public Health. Highlights include:
How a scabies outbreak among gorillas reshaped her approach to conservation, linking human health to the health of the gorillas;
The role of family planning and community health education in reducing human population pressure, human-wildlife conflict and improving both conservation outcomes and local livelihoods;
The balance between the benefits of ecotourism for funding conservation and the risks it poses to gorilla health;
How Gorilla Conservation Coffee provides alternative livelihoods for farmers while supporting endangered gorillas and their habitats.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Nandita Bajaj 0:00
Hi everyone, before we jump into today's episode, on behalf of my team at Population Balance, I'd like to share a brief message. Like many of you, we are deeply troubled by the results of the US election. While we are under no illusion that a victory by either political party in the United States would have led to meaningful steps toward reversing ecological overshoot, another term with Donald Trump as the leader of the United States will accelerate the trends underlying our deepening ecological and social crisis.
We are already seeing the elevation of misogynist and pronatalist rhetoric, and hearing of plans to eviscerate environmental protections and reproductive rights, and ramp up fossil fuel production. Under these circumstances, despair is a natural impulse. We understand the urge to succumb to nihilism—or even to accelerationism, the idea that we might welcome the quickening spiral toward collapse, with the hope that we might find a new beginning out of the ruins.
We must not give into these urges. Our only choice for the animals, the wild places, and the most vulnerable people already struggling to survive is to continue steadfast in our values and our work. We remain committed to our mission to shift the narratives underlying our broken system. More than ever, nurtured by the community we are creating in our shared awareness of the precarity of the web of life and our fierce protectiveness of all within it, we are reminded that we are not alone. We will stay engaged with you to build resilient, life-affirming alternatives to unending militarism and ecological rampage.
We are deeply interconnected, and our only choice is to nurture that connection in its abundance. Thank you for your partnership and support.
And here's today's episode.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 1:56
Two of the most controversial topics for communities is family planning and conservation, because conservation shows you care more about wildlife than people. So we don't tell people that have fewer children so that the wildlife habitats are not affected. We tell people, if you have fewer children, you're better able to balance the family budget. This resonates well with the men, especially, and you're able to take care of those children, make sure that they all get proper health care, enough food to eat, a proper education, and they get jobs. And then you break the cycle of poverty. The women also like the fact that now you have more control over your bodies. It's healthier for you. You can do something else with your life. And when you do that, the wildlife is better off. And so win, win situation for both.
Alan Ware 2:42
Our guest today is Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, Uganda's first wildlife vet and founder and CEO of Conservation Through Public Health. From empowering communities through family planning and public health to building sustainable livelihoods with gorilla conservation coffee, Dr Gladys shares her inspiring work that protects endangered species while uplifting local human communities.
Nandita Bajaj 3:14
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast, where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint, so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 3:38
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. We are proud to be the first and only non-profit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Our mission at Population Balance is to inspire a narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. And now on to today's guest. Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is the founder and CEO of Conservation Through Public Health, an award-winning NGO that protects endangered gorillas and other wildlife through One Health approaches. A wildlife veterinarian, Dr. Kalema-Zikusoka was instrumental in establishing Uganda Wildlife Authority's veterinary department, focusing on protecting gorillas and managing disease risks between humans and wildlife. She is an Ashoka Fellow and National Geographic Explorer, and her conservation leadership has been recognized worldwide with honors, including the United Nations Environment Program Champions of the Earth, the Edinburgh Medal for Science and Humanity, and is one of the 100 most influential women in Africa. Dr. Kalema-Zikusoka is actively involved in global health and conservation leadership, serving as chairperson of the Explorers Club Africa chapter and advising on multiple conservation boards. She is also author of the 2023 memoir, Walking With Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj 5:14
Hello, Dr. Gladys. It is such a pleasure to finally connect with you. Thank you so much for joining us today from your home in Uganda.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 5:22
Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really excited to be here, Nandita and Alan.
Nandita Bajaj 5:26
Thank you. And Dr. Gladys we've been following your work with great interest for many years, as you are one of the few conservationists that is connecting the links between human population growth and wildlife conservation in your work. We especially appreciate your wildlife protection efforts that balance the needs of human communities and those of nonhuman communities. And you've had a remarkable career as a pioneer in wildlife conservation, focusing on protecting gorillas, managing conflict and disease risks between humans and wildlife, and supporting community health all through your organization, Conservation Through Public Health. Before we go into this organization, we're actually curious to learn about your personal journey and what inspired you to become a wildlife veterinarian.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 6:23
Well, thank you so much for appreciating our efforts. I was inspired to become a wildlife veterinarian because I would say that I grew up as the last born in a family of six, and my siblings were quite a lot older than me, so the sibling I followed was five years older than me. My next brother, who I followed, was 10 years older than me, and he used to bring many stray cats and dogs home. So he also loved animals, and I really bonded with these animals, and they became my friends because my sister was out of my age bracket to play, and I hated seeing them suffering so early on in my life. I felt like I wanted to become a veterinarian who can relieve animals from suffering. And then when I got an unusual pet, a pet monkey that was not ours, but was belonging to the Cuban Ambassador to Uganda, the pet monkey came to our home. He was a neighbor to us, and he used to like to pull the cats and dogs' tails, steal food from the kitchen. And one time, when I was practicing the piano, I realized that he was watching me, so I went out of the room, and he sat down and played one note with one finger. And I was like, Wow, he's so intelligent. Not only his fingers and fingernails look like mine, he can actually also play the piano. So I think I got really fascinated by primates at that point, and later on I got an opportunity to set up a wildlife club at my high school in Uganda. And it was a time when Uganda had very little wildlife. We had just overcome the Idi Amin era. And sadly, Idi Amin killed my dad because he was a government minister in the previous government and the first government after independence. So there was a lot that had happened, but that also really affected me. And I felt like I should become a vet who also brings back the wildlife and also continue my father's legacy in that way, to restore Uganda to its former glory. Winston Churchill used to call Uganda the pearl of Africa. And so around that time, I started to think maybe I could become a vet who brings back wildlife, a wildlife vet. But that position didn't exist in my country yet, and I went to vet school in the UK. I had an opportunity to go there and at the Royal Veterinary College University of London, which was a very amazing experience. They also allowed me to study animals of my choice. So I came back to Uganda, and I worked with captive chimpanzees, which were victims of the bushmeat trade and in the animal orphanage at the Entebbe zoo. Then I also got to work with wild chimpanzees, and then I finally got to work with mountain gorillas when they had become habituated for tourism. And when I went to Bwindi, what struck me was it was a very long distance from Kampala. It was one of the most remote places I've ever been to in my life, but it was a very hard edge. As soon as you get to Bwindi, you find a hard edge between the community and the park. They just tell you, now, this is the forest, and people have cut right up to the forest edge. So that was pretty striking. It's a hard edge almost all over the park. And when we went to see the gorillas, it was such a magical experience for me, having wanted to study them for quite a while, because I'd heard about them when I was setting up the wildlife club in my high school, Shibuli secondary school. So I went after visiting the gorillas, and I saw that we could easily make them sick, because my research showed that the two gorilla groups visited by tourists had a higher parasite burden than those visited by researchers. And I thought that maybe tourism is affecting the gorillas, maybe reducing their immunity, so that they have more parasites. I wasn't quite sure what was going on, but I started to realize that tourists can have both a positive and a negative impact on the mountain gorillas. The positive impact was that the local communities, most of them were hired from the local community, and they were benefiting so much from tourism. Like many of the rangers used to be poachers before some of them. Actually, we used to call them 'born again' poachers, because they were earning more money protecting the wildlife rather than killing it. And so I could see the positive benefits of tourism, but also the potentially negative ones, because we're so closely related to gorillas. We share 98.4% genetic material and can easily make each other sick. And I felt like I should probably just become a full-time wildlife veterinarian, because the gorillas were under a number of threats - the high human population growth, the very hard edge when you get to their habitat, the forest habitat, but also very concerned about the disease transmission. And that made me feel like I want to become a wildlife vet. So I wrote to the head of the national parks at the time, Dr. Edroma. He gave me permission to do the research, and I sent him my research report, and I said, I want to become your first wildlife veterinarian, and this is what a wildlife vet can do in conservation. And I was very happy when a couple of months later he wrote back and said, your job is waiting for you. I was like, wow. And so that started a very next exciting journey of my life.
Nandita Bajaj 11:16
Well, this is such a fascinating story, and I love how you've combined so many of those incredible experiences, the experiences you had interacting with these animals in your own home, to seeing the beautiful pearl that Uganda represented in Africa disappear in front of your eyes. And then wanting to carry forth your father's legacy with this work that's really admirable work, and it's what we call in our field, humane education, which is connecting the dots between human rights and wellbeing to animal and ecosystem rights and wellbeing. And it's exactly what you seem to be doing, and we can see why there's so much overlap in our collective work.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 12:05
Yes, well, thank you.
Alan Ware 12:07
And as you note in the book Walking With Gorillas, your book published last year, wildlife conservation is still a male-dominated field, and you were starting as not just Uganda's first wildlife vet, but the first woman vet in Uganda. What were some of the challenges at that time, and what have been some of the changes you've seen in wildlife conservation since you started?
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 15:00
Yes, well, I'm so glad you've enjoyed reading Walking With Gorillas. I would say that I've seen a lot of changes over time. When I first started out, there were hardly any women in wildlife conservation. At least there were no women going out into the field, following the animals, doing patrols. All the rangers who went out in the field were men. There were women wardens who'd be at the offices in the field or goto meet communities or at the park headquarters, but there were no women going out to the animals. And me, being a veterinarian, I had to go out to the animals. So that was quite of a new experience for everybody. But I did get a lot of support because I had a unique skill I was bringing to the table. You know, if an animal was sick, they'd call me out to, you know, to remove snares or to treat sick animals, and I was the only person who had that knowledge or that role within the organization, so I was respected for that and even moving animals as well. So it was quite an experience. I didn't really think so much about being a woman there alone, because I just wanted to get the job done. I wanted to show everyone how I could help them to solve issues through my role. And that was what I was more focused on. You know, we had to move problem elephants. We had to almost move a gorilla, but in the end, ended up in the forest because he was living on community land but semi-habituated, treating sick gorillas. So there was a lot of things going on, but I'm glad to say that now I've been doing this work for almost 30 years, because I started out as a resident in 1994 and as the first veterinarian for the Uganda Wildlife Authority in 1996 and I've seen that now we have rangers, female rangers. They can carry a gun. They can walk with everybody, if it's not guiding tourists, going on patrol, going with researchers. That never used to happen. And so about 20% of the rangers at Bwindi are women, which is fantastic, but I think seeing women role models has made them much more interested. They can see, oh, I can also do this. It's not just a job for a man to go out in the bush and look after animals and protect dangerous animals, you know, like elephants, which are endangered. So I think that has been wonderful. I know when we went and held the first health education workshop on the risks of human and gorilla disease transmission, when people made gorillas sick, and I was asked to lead that effort, being the only veterinarian in the organization. I went as a woman leading a team of men. I was the head person leading. It was me as a veterinarian. And then there were two community conservation warden and ranger who were men, and then the sub-county health assistant who was a man. And when we went to speak to the communities, the ranger told me the women are whispering, because very few women spoke in that meeting, maybe one or two. They were all very shy, but he told me that women are whispering and saying, we need to educate our daughters. We need to educate our girl child, because look at her. She's leading a team of men. And I'm glad to say that now many women stand up and lead, give presentations through our One Health approach to conservation, where they get up and talk about the importance of having manageable families, keeping our children healthy and hygienic, planting trees, not eating bush meat, protecting the gorillas. They stand up and give talks about it. And half of our community volunteers, the community health and conservation workers, which in Uganda we call village health and conservation teams, half are men and half are women, which is very important to have both men and women on either side. Because as I'm seeing it, women are getting more involved in conservation and men are getting more involved in health care and family planning through our approach. So over time, I've seen more and more women getting involved in conservation. What I'm not seeing much of is women leaders in conservation, and I'm on the Leadership Council for Women for Environment Africa that's trying to help women to realize their leadership potential in the conservation and environment field. And most of us in there are either founders of organizations or have been at senior levels and were denied that chance to get to the top level, because we are women. And so it was founded by Dr. Leela Hazzah, who's Egyptian and helped to set up Lion Guardians. She's a co-founder of Lion Guardians. She convinced us all to get involved. And Dr. Colleen Begg started Niassa Carnivore Project in Mozambique. And Doctor Winnie Kiiru started Conservation Kenya in Kenya. And we all got together and thought, we need to do this so that a lot of women can get mentored. And so there's a mentorship course that goes on every year, and women are mentored into these leadership positions that they want to achieve. And so there is more of a concerted effort, but at the moment, it's a very tiny percentage.
Nandita Bajaj 17:15
It's clear that you're such a role model for many young girls and also a lot of women who are interested in this kind of work. So we really appreciate what you're doing.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 17:26
Thank you so much.
Nandita Bajaj 17:28
You also mentioned in your book, Walking With Gorillas, that nine months into the job, you encountered some mountain gorillas who had a skin disease. And that this completely transformed your approach to conservation. Can you speak to that transformation that happened for you?
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 17:46
Yes, it was another turning point in my life, because I felt it was so important to have vets in conservation, and I was very excited to be Uganda's first wildlife vet at the time. And then I was told that the gorillas are losing hair and developing white, scaly skin, which I found weird. So I asked the veterinarians in Rwanda, where they'd had a veterinary unit running for a long time, the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project. I asked them if they had seen anything like that, and they hadn't. And then I spoke to a human doctor friend of mine, because in vet school I had learnt that common things occur commonly. When an animal is sick, you go for the most common cause of disease, not the rarest cause of disease. So when I asked her, What is the most common skin disease in people, she said to me, it's scabies or sarcoptic mange. And I was very surprised, because she had also had her training in the UK as a medical doctor, Dr. Catherine Sozi, and she told me, when she got back to Uganda, she was seeing different kind of diseases because of Uganda is a developing country, UK is a developed country. And she said that low income groups of people in Uganda pick up diseases like that because of less than adequate hygiene. And so I went with the bottle of ivermectin, which treats all parasites both inside, endo and ectoparasites like scabies caused by the mites. It had surprised me a lot, because in the UK where I did my veterinary training, people never used to get scabies, but they would occasionally pick up sarcoptic mange or scabies from their cat or dog, but it was always a temporary infection, because we are not closely related to canines. But with gorillas and humans, there's a close relation, which means we are more likely to pass each other's diseases onto each other. So I went with a bottle of ivermectin, and when we went there, we did find out that was actually scabies, treated the gorilla which we had darted - the juvenile gorilla, Kasikazi, with drugs, ivermectin, and then the rest eventually got treated. But sadly, we lost the baby gorilla. And then we had some workshops after that, a couple of years after, and people started saying, Actually, not only are the gorillas likely to pick up scabies, but they're also picking up other things when they go into community land to eat people's banana plants, and which they do, because once they lose their fear of people, they start to range in places they used to range before gorilla tourism began and before their forest habitat was cut. And so now, because of the high human population growth, their habitat has been cut, and they're still going out into people's gardens to eat their banana plants. They've started to go out to eat banana plants because they've lost their fear of people, and people put out dirty clothing on scarecrows to chase away gorillas, baboons and other wildlife, and that's probably how they got the scabies. But they said that they also don't cover their rubbish heaps. There's open defecation. And they wanted me to lead the effort, because I was the only veterinarian at the time, and as the only one who had some form of public health training, because veterinary public health is like the same as human public health essentially, the principles are the same. And so that was an exciting challenge they gave me. And so I went ahead and developed brochures in English and the local language with a local artist in Kampala, just, you know, really easy visuals for someone to understand. And then I went together with a community conservation warden and ranger and the sub-county health assistant. And when we went there to talk about all these issues, I went there to tell them what I thought the problem was. And after they understood what the problem was, I was about to tell them what their solution is for their problem. And the ranger touched my arm and said, Let's hear what they have to say first. And they came up with amazing solutions, much more varied, much more practical than what I was proposing for them, which was a very humbling moment for me as a veterinarian who's used to solving people's problems. And one thing that they did say is that they want health services to be brought closer to them. I didn't realize that they lived so far away from the nurse health center. And if they got sick, they would carry them on a stretcher, and sometimes they got there when it's too late. Then they also wanted continuous health education, because they felt it shouldn't be a one-off event. We met about a thousand people. And then they also wanted to support the human-gorilla conflict resolution team that is trained to herd gorillas back when they come out with gumboots, raincoats, food rations, and so a lot of that is what we used tostart the non-profit. But it made me realize that you can't really keep the gorillas healthy without improving the health of the and wellbeing of the human neighbors. And that's led to the beginnings of Conservation Through Public Health a few years later.
Alan Ware 22:12
And I appreciate how in the scabies example, you learn that the villagers had so many good ideas, ideas you didn't necessarily expect. You thought you would be telling them how to do everything, and they had all these great ideas. And we've heard from other guests about poaching and how there are never enough rangers to fight against the poachers. So if you get buy in from the villagers who would be doing the poaching, if you get them not to poach in the first place, then you don't need as many rangers, right? So it's admirable that you have more of that bottom-up community involvement right from the outset that you saw as a young person when you were just starting out.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 22:53
And actually we find that by improving community health, we make them feel that we don't only care about the wildlife, but we also care about them, and healthcare is a basic human right, and this makes them then care more about the wildlife and conservation. And I think that's another good entry point to win their support for conservation. On top of reducing the risk of disease transmission, where we found that as community members are getting healthier, gorillas are falling sick less often, but also at the sametime, they're having a more positive attitude to conservation because we're showing them that we also care about them and not only the wildlife.
Nandita Bajaj 23:29
The connection about the spread of zoonotic diseases between humans and vertebrates is one that isn't talked about enough. And WHO more recently said that some 60% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in nature. And among the leading drivers of these diseases, as you saw firsthand in your efforts,is the combination of human population growth, which brings human closer to wildlife, and the rise in demand for animal protein, and how in a lot of the lower and middle income countries, there's been greater and greater agricultural intensification, such as through factory farms, which now I was so shocked to realize that it's responsible for more than 50% of all zoonotic diseases. So it's a really dangerous mix.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 24:26
Yes, definitely, it's all interconnected. And actually, I was really honored to be among 27 people on the World Health Organization scientific advisory group for origin of novel pathogens, which was created during the COVID 19 pandemic to help create a framework to prevent future pandemics. And actually, since that time, now, monkeypox is becoming a big issue. Ebola keeps re-emerging. And also we were tasked to try and advise on studies that clearly defined the source of SARS Covid-2, which caused COVID-19. But yes, that whole thing of wet live markets with animals in tiny cages, allowing animals get stressed, viruses can jump to humans. And then we saw that even during the pandemic, viruses jump from humans to mink, although the source of COVID hasn't yet been determined. But once COVID got into humans, it still managed to still jump to animals and back and forth. And so as long as you have poor welfare, both of humans and animals, and cramped conditions and encroaching on forests, encroaching on swamps, increasing the interface between people and wildlife, to cutting down trees, youknow, reclaiming swamps, all that kind of thing, you increase the chances of emerging and re-emerging diseases jumping back and forth between people and animals. So it's definitely a big issue, and a lot of itis when you have high human population growth rates, because people start to go into the natural habitats to try and have more land to cultivate and grow their crops and all of that.
Alan Ware 26:00
And Conservation Through Public Health, which you started in 2003 has three key programs: the gorilla conservation, the community health, and the creation of viable alternative livelihoods. Could you highlight each of those components of those programs, and we'll go into more in depth on each of those later, but just to get an overview of those three.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 26:21
The three key programs of CTPH - wildlife health and conservation, where we basically monitor the health of the gorillas and other wildlife to make sure that they're remaining healthy and they're not picking up diseases from people or livestock inside or outside the park. That's a key part of our program. Also, we have a gorilla health and community conservation center field laboratory at Bwindi National Park, due to support from Tusk Trust. And in this lab, we're able to analyze samples from gorillas every month. And then with the community health part, we use a One Health approach to conservation that also takes into consideration the health of the animals as well as the people. So more like a population- health-environment approach, because we also add promotion of community-based family planning. And in that we basically work with a group of community health workers who are trained to do conservation work. Each of them is in charge of about 30 households. They reach them regularly every quarter. They visit them and make sure they're adopting good health and hygiene practices. They're encouraging them to adopt family planning. It's all voluntary, but a lot of them see the benefits very quickly, because women don't want to have babies every year. They want to do something else with their lives, and men want to reduce poverty in their homes. So it's a way of balancing the family budget. At the same time, they promote good nutrition, sustainable agriculture. They also talk about the dangers of eating bush meats, because they can get sick, and zoonotic disease transmission and how to prevent it. And that's really great. We've seen over time, homes are really changing. And also, another thing we've started to track is food security. So during the pandemic, we realized that people are poaching because they are hungry, because tourism disappeared overnight because of lockdowns all over the world, even within Uganda. And so they weren't getting tourists coming, and they used to use the money from tourism to buy food, and now they were stuck. So we got them back into sustainable farming, into farming, but in a sustainable way, and we provided them with fast-growing seedlings that can grow within one to four months in their gardens. And from them, they are able to feed themselves. Then they don't have to enter the forest to poach. And so that's the village health and conservation teams. They carry out a lot of behavior change communication. And then the third program is alternative livelihoods,which, when we found out that many people are unhealthy because they are poor, it was important to improve their livelihoods. So we started off by improving the livelihoods of the community volunteers. Sowe provided them with group projects so that they could keep doing their work promoting good health and conservation practices, even in the absence of a salary. And later on, we started to engage coffee farmers. My husband is a co-founder of Conservation Through Public Health, together with a vet technician, Stephen Rubanga, who used to work for minister of agriculture. So my husband Lawrence thought that it'd be great to develop a global coffee brand to save the gorillas. A lot of the time when you're visiting the gorillas, you come across coffee farms, and most people have never seen a coffee tree. They only see coffee in a cafe or supermarket. And so they're also fascinated. It's part of getting to see the gorillas. You start off outside the park, then you enter the park. And I didn't realize that these farmers were not getting a fair market or a steady price, and they'll still enter the forest to poach, because it was easier if they wanted meat to poach than try and sell their coffee for a good price. And we did find out that they have good coffee, so we gave them an above market price for good coffee, and we work with agronomists to make sure that they're growing it properly, processing it properly. And a donation from every bag of coffee sold goes to support the work of Conservation Through Public Health to improve community health, gorilla health, and conservation education in the same communities. So we're able to provide traceable, single source coffee of the best quality, which is able to help the gorillas. So that's been fantastic.
Alan Ware 30:15
Yeah, and you've mentioned that the population pressure and the population growth rate around the national parks is quite high. And I just looked up, the population growth rate of Uganda is over 2%. The country's population is 50 million and headed probably to 85 million by 2050. And Minnesota, the US state where I live, is about 6 million, and it's a little smaller than Uganda. So it's impressive that you're able to do what you're doing to save large mammals. You have great habitat in Uganda, much better than Minnesota would ever have for any of that. But you've been able to protect a lot of that, even though, like you said, high population density often goes right up to the park, right where there's a clear line where the humans are and where they can't be, and to be able to keep them from going into the park to poach. So we greatly appreciate that focus on family planning and reproductive health.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 31:13
Just talking about family planning is we started off below the country average. We had 22% of women were on a modern family planning method when we started out in 2007 and then 10 years later, we were above the country average for 67% in the first two parishes we worked in. And the country average was 30% and went up to 45%. And in the Kanungu district where we started the family planning program around Bwindi, the fertility rate reduced from seven to four, which we we're very excited about. And we hope it will keep going down when people realize that if they want a better quality of life, they should have more manageable family sizes.
Nandita Bajaj 31:51
Those are very impressive numbers, and you seem to be doing it in such a successful way. How has that work been received in the community, and are there takeaways on how to make these programs more effective?
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 32:06
That's a great question, because I would say that two of the most controversial topics for communities is family planning and conservation, because conservation shows you care more about wildlife than people. So we don't tell people that have fewer children so that the wildlife habitats are not affected. We tell people, if you have fewer children, you're better able to balance the family budget. This resonates well with the men, especially, and you're able to take care of those children, make sure that they all get proper health care, they get enough food to eat because you don't have such a large family to feed, and they get a proper education, and they get jobs. And then you break the cycle of poverty. The women also like the fact that now, when you have the children who are manageable, you have more control over your bodies. It's healthier for you. You can do something else with your life in between having the babies as you're spacing them. And so that all resonates really well with them. And we tell them, and when you do that, the wildlife is better off, and it can benefit more from the wildlife. And so win, win situation for both. And so yeah, the way that you represent the information has to be done very carefully, and we've learnt a lot about balancing the family budget. And I think it came off really well, because when I started out, women were having, some women over the age of 25 had had five children. By the age of 36 that had 10, and they were looking much older than their age, and not all their children were going to school. Half are for going to school, the other half are for chasing wildlife from the garden. So of course, the human-wildlife conflict also comes in. It's another driver for them to want to have more children. So we realized that we had to address all of this holistically through education, behavior change, communication and physically going out and improving health services to the local communities. We present it as a holistic package, which then makes them more acceptable to accept conservation and buy into conservation and to buy into family planning.
Alan Ware 33:59
Yeah, I thought it was interesting. Well, the village health and conservation teams seem to be the main way that a lot of the family planning and other public health information is transmitted to people, and that you have 270 of those, I think I read reaching 30,000 people and 6000 households. And it's interesting how you mentioned that a key part of those teams is using these flip charts for good and bad family, right? And that a lot of that was created by the villagers. So the villagers had a big part in coming up with the components of that. Could you describe some of the flip charts and how that became effective?
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 34:38
Yeah, developing the flip charts was a really exciting part of our work, because we worked with Mango Tree Enterprises, which is founded by an Ashoka Fellow. I'm also an Ashoka Fellow, so I met him through the Ashoka network, and he's called Craig Esbeck and he developed these environmentally friendly, affordable teaching aids. He's a teacher by profession. He developed these teaching aids primarily for education and public health. So when we went to him and said, we want to do something similar in our area, they had never done one with conservation in it. But they did tell us that it works really well with them to have two families, one that's doing things well, and one that's not doing things well. It works really well. The bad family that everything is, oh, they're really suffering. You know, have too many children. Only half are going to school. Other half are chasing wildlife from the garden, and then they get into trouble because they go poaching with their dad because they don't have enough food on the table. And then the dad gets so frustrated, he goes drinking to drown out his sorrows. There's domestic violence, beats up the mom, saying, where's my food? Then they have teenage pregnancies because an older son then gets two wives and makes them pregnant, abandons them, children die young. It's a whole series of events. They even get arrested for poaching. And then the good family, they sit down and plan before they have children. How many children will we have? They have four, which is good, great for that part of Uganda, that part of the world. And then all of them are going to school when the gorillas come to their garden, instead of trying to herd them back like the first family did, and getting injuries on both sides. Instead, they end up calling the gorilla guardians to herd them back. And then eventually, the boy becomes a ranger, the girl becomes a nurse, because they've been able to go to school and the graduation parties. Everyone's like, I'd rather be the second family. So that's really helpedto change people as well.
Alan Ware 36:31
And it all starts with a smaller family. So that's powerful.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 36:35
It all does. What Mango Tree said to us is, when you've done the first draft, take it to the communities, get their input before you finalize it. So we did. We tested it with them, and they gave us more input so that it was based on real life scenarios that everybody could relate to. And these flip charts have no words on them. It's just images. So everybody is able to interpret what they can see from the flip charts. So everyone it's interesting how every time you present it, people have a different angle to the story or a different piece that you hadn't thought about. And that's good because it just develops a discussion point that then makes people think about their actions and what they could result in. And that's great, because it's not dictating to people what they should think, but it's giving them a chance to think about it. And so it's worked really well, and yeah, we're excited about them.
Alan Ware 37:25
And you've also highlighted how ecotourism is an essential element providing alternative livelihoods, which is one of your major programs to reduce poaching, forest overuse. And I've heard you call ecotourism a necessary evil. So I'm wondering, what are the trade-offs between ecotourism and gorilla conservation, and how do you manage that balance?
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 37:48
I would say that ecotourism is a necessary evil, because it's actually the mountain gorilla population that has tourism. It's the only gorilla subspecies whose number is increasing. The other three subspecies -the western lowland gorillas, eastern lowland gorillas and cross river gorillas - the numbers are going down because there isn't viable alternatives that stops people entering the gorillas' habitat to poach, collect firewood and come into conflict with the wildlife. And tourism seems to be a very good trade-off. So it's reducing people's need to enter the park. It helped to stop people cutting down the forest, because now they had another way to earn a living. So tourism is really, really helping. However, the reason why it's a bit of a something to have to worry about is the disease issues, because in order for gorilla tourism to occur, you have to get close to the animals. And it's that intimate experience that people get when they get close to gorillas. And gorillas are so accommodating that they will allow you into their home, into their family to visit, and that deep emotional connection is the reason why people pay a lot of money to visit the gorillas. But in the process of getting close to them, they can pass infectious diseases like the common flu, COVID-19 to the gorillas, and then they can wipe out a whole gorilla family, or a whole gorilla population. So it's trying to find that delicate balance. And also another problem with tourism is the fact that you can't get enough of it. You know, like when I started out, there were two gorilla groups habituated for tourism and one for research. As I speak now, there's 28 gorilla groups habituated for tourism in Uganda, and they still habituate more and more. And every time you habituate a gorilla group, you're committed to following them for the rest of their lives, whether or not there are tourists, because they have now lost their fear of people, and they can easily get poached. They won't know the difference between a good person and a bad person, and people keep wanting more and more gorillas to be habituated because of the significant revenue that comes from habituating a gorilla group. And so there's just finding that delicate balance between too much tourism, but also even within the tourism that's there that's bringing much needed benefits and lifting people out of poverty, as much as it's creating jobs, there's the threat of disease transmission. So during the COVID pandemic, we advocated for everybody visiting great apes, not only in gorillas, but chimpanzees as well, to be wearing masks. And this has continued beyond the pandemic, because they are getting less respiratory diseases like the common flu, and that is really helping, and it's the new norm. Everybody does it now, and it's continuing forever, because that's the only way you can protect them. And so there's a lot of things that we're keeping on doing beyond the pandemic, just to make sure that every country that has great ape tourism follows these regulations. And we developed a policy brief for all the countries where great apes are found in Africa, both in English, French, and we even added Portuguese more recently, just to make sure that as countries are developing tourism programs for great apes, and as they need to take into consideration that tourism, if it's not done well, can end up wiping out the very species they're trying to protect with tourism. But another thing that we advocate for as well is, as much as we are preventing disease transmission, also tourists should visit local community members, because when a community member meets a tourist, they're much less likely to poach. So it's not enough to just visit the animals, but you also support the communities who live alongside the animals,
Alan Ware 41:19
And you do mention there's a need for some non-habituated groups, right, as kind of control groups within the interior of the parks. Are you still able to maintain enough non-habituated gorilla groups?
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 41:32
Yes, we are. I think for Bwindi, it's easier because the forest is like quite steep and people should not sleep in the forest because they also have elephants that can trample on you or so it's dangerous to sleep in the forest, and it's not good practice. People have to be able to go and come back on the same day, so that they can only do it by visiting the gorillas, which are closer to the edge of the park. The ones that are in the middle you can't go and come back on the same day from the forest edge. So hopefully, they will be protected from having to see human beings, and they can be a control group that if there's anything that happens, if there's a disease that spreads through the habituated gorillas, or there's poaching or something like that, you always have a control group that doesn't have to be visited by tourists. And I think it's very important also to be able to compare the control groups and the ones at the outskirts. And we tend to find that actually gorillas in the outskirts, even when they meet with each other, they tend to mix with each other from the outskirts of the park. And the control groups, they don't tend to mix with the ones that are habituated. And that helps a lot as well.
Nandita Bajaj 42:40
Yeah, what you describe is a truly wicked problem, isn't it? Because, on the one hand, this incredible program that you have created allowing for the gorilla population to grow for the first time, as you've seen such remarkable increases in numbers. And at the same time, the habituation of these gorillas, in a way, is taking away the very experience that conservation is supposed to give them, which is freedom from human interference, being able to live out their lives in their natural settings. So I really empathize with what a difficult situation you're in, trying to do good conservation work while keeping the needs of the community in mind and helping the gorillas thrive in the best way possible, which is through some form of human interference through this ecotourism. And of course, population growth, this rise to the middle class, is a huge part of it. More and more people want to travel. More and more people want these exotic experiences. I'm sure, as you are, we hope that there will be a point where tourism of this kind can be scaled back enough that people can simply leave some of these exotic animals alone to liveout their lives in peace without human interference.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 44:04
Yes, it's a very delicate balance. But without the money, it's harder to sustain conservation efforts. But it's finding the balance. Like the first gorilla that has habituated for tourism in Bwindi, Ruhondeza, he died at the age of about 50, and we estimate that he saw over 50,000 visitors in his lifetime. How many people get 50,000 visitors?
Nandita Bajaj 44:29
Yeah. You're doing such important work, quite amazing how much influence you've managed to have. And another one of your programs have expanded beyond ecotourism, with the gorilla conservation coffee brand, which you talked about a little bit earlier, providing alternative livelihoods to reduce wildlife poaching and forest overuse. I wonder if there's anything more you'd like to add in terms of how this program has been doing?
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 44:57
Yes, actually, it started before the pandemic, but the pandemic realized the potential of gorilla conservation. It helped us to realize the potential, because when we started it just before the pandemic, I would say maybe a couple of years before, we were engaging 75 farmers, of which only five were women, and were trying to also target reform poachers, or trying to help the coffee reduce the dependence on the park. And as we went along, when the pandemic happened, of course, the lockdowns all over the world, tourists were not coming anymore, because a lot of people were earning money, even just carrying a tourist bag to the gorillas. They would earn a lot that day, much more than they would earn the whole month digging in their garden. And so suddenly, tourism disappeared overnight. And once we're able to get markets, cargo flights were still able to fly to the UK. So manyEuropeans came in and bought a lot of coffee. Every month they were placing an order from May 2020. That meant that the money that they paid us enabled us to buy coffee from the farmers and keep them out of the forest at a critical time when they couldn't earn money from tourism or the economy had really gone down. So whenever I would give a talk and say, even if you can't visit Uganda right now because of lockdowns all over the world, you can still support the gorillas by buying gorilla conservation coffee. And later on, it became available in the US in 2021, and New Zealand, and so that people were able to buy it and still feel that they're helping the gorillas. So it really fulfilled this potential then. As we speak now, we have 630 farmers, of which 230 are women, which is fantastic. It's continued to grow. Although we don't have enough working capital to buy coffee from everybody, we are still looking for markets. Actually, to tell the truth, the demand for the coffee is higher than the supply, but the working capital will enable us to meet the demand and also continue to buy more coffee. So we're trying to connect all those markets so that we are able to provide traceable coffee, which is very delicious, but when people take it, they feel like they're helping the gorillas to keep going. And we've restarted the coffee distribution in America. We have a specific website for America, gccoffeeusa.com, where people can order coffee and through that ordering of the coffee, we're able to keep the gorillas....company. We're able to keep people out of the forest and reduce the threats to the gorillas.
Nandita Bajaj 47:21
I think that's an excellent way to establish some independence for these workers, so that they are not constantly just dependent on ecotourism. So there's, you know, some sense of, as you said, independence, food sovereignty, and there's a sense of pride that comes from that contribution.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 47:41
Thank you. And actually, one of the I was really touched when one of the coffee farmers, the women coffee farmers, she said to us that she wants to become a village health and conservation team member, because the one who's in her village has so many homes, a bit more than the average, and she wants to help out, and she wants to be part of that program as well, which is lovely. Because actually, right now, actually, the village health and conservation teams have increased to 430 since I wrote the book, and last year, it's happened over the past year. And they're now reaching 10,000 homes to over 50,000 people, because we recently expanded to two other parishes. So we're really excited about that.
Alan Ware 48:19
And through your work at Conservation Through Public Health, you've learned so much about the linkages of human, animal, environmental health within Uganda. You've talked a little bit about the broader African conservation collaborations that you're doing. Are you anticipating bringing some of what you've learned in Uganda to Africa as a whole, and especially maybe the family planning element. Are there any discussions about that?
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 48:46
Yes, there are. We've actually started doing it in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, where they also have a high human population growth rate, but they really do want to adopt family planning, contraception, because even if it's a largely Catholic country, they want to reduce poverty in their homes. So they've really embraced the program. Unfortunately, not all of them have access to free contraceptives, and that's now we're trying to carry out advocacy to make sure that health groups, at least the government, is able to provide free contraceptive because that will really increase the adoption rate. But yes, we've gone to DRC, and we want to work in other countries in Africa where gorillas are found, and help to expand the population-health-environment approach and the sustainable livelihoods,alternative livelihoods in all these countries. Because actually, not all of them have the opportunity for ecotourism, just because, you know, there's a lot of civil war and conflict. But if something like being able to have manageable families can help to reduce their needs to depend on the forest, that can really make a big difference. And also we can support them with things like gorilla conservation coffee in those countries. Then even if they don't have tourism, they can still earn a living, and they don't have to depend on the forest for food. But something else we want to do is also try and expand our protected habitat for gorillas in Uganda, because as the numbers of gorillas are going up, the space isn't growing for them. So we're trying to work on fundraising for that, because as the numbers grow, there's more human-wildlife conflict and there's more potential for disease transmission and more conflict. So we're trying to talk to landowners, some of whom are very willing to sell their land because they can't do anything with it because of wildlife coming onto their land.
Alan Ware 50:28
Yeah, I heard you mention that they were mostly willing to sell, which is encouraging, but it does cost quite a bit of money to buy all the acres I suppose you would need, which would be substantial.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 50:41
It is. It's a lot of money, but we're working hard on that.
Nandita Bajaj 50:45
Well, that's really remarkable work that you're doing. Dr. Gladys, and we feel really honored to have had the chance to talk to you today, we want to thank you so much for your time today and for sharing both your personal journey and all of the vital work that you are doing for both human and nonhuman communities to thrive and cohabit together.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka 51:09
Thank you so much.
Alan Ware 51:11
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you, and we hope that you'll consider a one-time or a recurring donation
Nandita Bajaj 51:39
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
