Quiz shows for conservation

by Anselme Toto Volahy, Francisco (Coco) Rakotombololona & Lance Woolaver(Durrell Madagascar)

In Madagascar working with local communities is key to protecting biodiversity. In the Menabe region of Western Madagascar, we have spent many years studying and setting up protection for many endemic species such as the giant jumping rat, narrow-striped mongoose and flat-tailed tortoise. But a large part of the work being carried out by our team concerns community awareness and support for local capacity development. Why do we do this though and what are real outcomes for people and conservation?

Because Menabe is a very special place for endemic species, sections of the remaining dry forest habitat were identified for inclusion as a New Protected Area called Menabe-Antimena. Surrounding this area are ten forest blocks, each of which is managed by local villages. This is where the challenge comes – for communities to effectively manage these natural resources they require assistance, capacity support and training.

But there are different ways of achieving this and our strategy is to combine awareness raising events that are fun and engage people with methods to facilitate dialogue between the key stakeholders and build the necessary skills to monitor and manage these resources.

In an approach that is new for Madagascar, we have worked with the communities to develop participatory monitoring methods so they can monitor the state of the forest. Then every year villages have an annual environmental competition and compete to show how well they protected the biodiversity within their forest. Part of the incentive is that they receive funding for development prizes (rehabilitating schools, building wells etc.) based on where they rank in the competition.

So here comes the Quiz Show – which has proven to be one of the most effective and popular tools that we use in Menabe for increasing awareness. It’s a great big party which brings communities together. We give a talk on a specific theme, e.g. the benefits of a healthy forest to people’s quality of life, and then the villages are given questions related to the talk with small prizes for those who get the right answers.

The format is such that everyone that takes part receives something, so everyone ends up a winner for taking part. It just might take two or three tries and a bit of help from Anselme and Coco to make sure everyone ends up with the right answer in the end! This year’s Quiz Show with many villages and loads of school children taking part. Everyone stayed until the sun went down and it was a lot of fun for all involved.

So that’s the fun bit – at the same time we facilitated a series of between the villages and our local government partners to look at the laws concerning protection of the environment and the requirements of the villages. This year we are focussing on the development of the management plan for the protected area New Protected Area. This included a discussion of the progress towards the transfer of forest management to the local communities. Each community received maps outlining the types of activities and management plans for their particular forest block, and for the larger New Protected Area of Menabe-Antimena.

This year we also celebrated World Environment Day in June with a theme based on protecting the forest and changing the perception of Madagascar from “The Red Island” to a “Green” one. The celebration this year was particularly special for Durrell. Ten local communities received the final legal transfer of management from the central government, and this transfer was made official during the celebration. The support of these management transfers has been a long term goal of Durrell. From this day on, the local community associations at these sites will be legally responsible for managing their forests, and will have the ability to respond rapidly to any misuse of the forest.

As if this all wasn’t enough – the Local Forest Wardens (Contrôleurs Forestiers Locaux or CFL) who carry out the monitoring. These CFL received their official uniforms from Durrell earlier this year. During the World Environment Day celebrations, the CFL were presented with official badges signed by the Regional Director of the Ministry of Environment and Forests. All sixty-six CFL are from the local communities and this offical recognition of their positions provides them with the respect needed to carry out their work. The CFL have been trained by Durrell, not only to report illegal activities within the forest, but also to collect biodiversity data. We will be continuing this training in 2010 so that we can strengthen and improve this system of local monitoring.

Based on the successes in Menabe, we are now implementing similar programmes at our other project sites in Madagascar. As a further sign of the effectiveness of our approach, other conservation NGOs throughout Madagascar are using our community conservation in Menabe as a model for developing their conservation projects throughout Madagascar.