Month: October 2018

Ethiopian community embraces restoration guided by one man’s vision

I first met Aba Hawi in 2014, at his home in a remote village in the north of Ethiopia. His story amazed me so much that I turned it into a documentary film!

His real name is Gebre-Michael, but locals call him Aba Hawi, which stands for ‘man of fire’. Over the last 30 years he has mobilized his community to completely regenerate their land.

When he first started this work his community ostracized him, as they failed to see that protecting their trees was fundamental to the continued existence of their livelihoods. They even accused him of spying for the rebel army who at that time were fighting the national government. But eventually his efforts paid off. Villages that were on the verge of collapse after years of drought and land over-use are now thriving and self-sufficient. Thanks to his conservation work, once barren hillsides are today covered with forests, cereal crops grow where previously there was only degraded soil, and most importantly, water has returned to the wells. Aba Hawi’s ability to motivate and mobilize an entire community to stay on and restore their landscape surely makes him a worthy Landscape Hero.

The fight for an iconic animal

The Leuser Ecosystem is a biodiversity hotspot in North Sumatra, Indonesia. It is the last place on earth where you can find critically endangered Sumatran rhinos, elephants, tigers, but most importantly for Panut, Sumatran Orangutans.

Horrified by the rapid rate of deforestation in this key refuge for some of the world’s most loved creatures, Panut decided that enough was enough: it was time to be the solution.

Since the creation of the Orangutan Information Centre, Panut has replaced thousands and thousands of hectares of encroaching oil palm plantations with brand new forests, able to provide orangutans with food, habitat and locomotive pathways in just five years. Panut knew there was no long term sustainability for his projects without involving the local community.

He employed agricultural workers from the plantations to plant trees for him instead, maintaining economic growth in rural villages. This project expanded into orangutan rescue missions and relocation, community outreach programs, tackling forest crime and researching more about the forest and the impacts of his projects. Thanks to Panut, I was able to walk through his brand new forests and see evidence of baby elephants and nesting orangutans. More importantly, I could stand on the tower and look over at the ever expanding canopy with gibbons calling in the background. That’s how I knew deep in my heart that these critically endangered animals wouldn’t be at risk of extinction for much longer.

Rehabilitating land and lives

Text: Sam Dindi

KOMB green youth group was started in in June 2017 by twenty young people who wanted to restore the banks of Nairobi River banks passing through Korogocho Area. Fredrick Okinda, the founding member of the group, says that they decided to rehabilitate that area as a way to keep themselves busy, seeking a fresh start from a life of crime, by creating a green space where they could rest and interact without fear.

Between 2010 and 2018 they lost 15 young men to mob justice, gang fights and being shot dead by police and this was more than a wakeup call that crime does not pay. The small patch they decided to rehabilitate was so heavily polluted with human fecal matter, they had to handle the waste with their bare hands.

At the same time, they faced a part of the local community that was against the the river bank rehabilitation, since they did not trust the youth-led initiative. One of the green park’s biggest successes is that the youth of Korogocho now have reasons to believe in themselves that something positive can come out of them. Police officers whom the youth once dreaded are frequent visitors to this small Eden and interact freely with the reformed youth as children play and women plait their hair without any fear.

Fredrick requests well-wishers to support the initiative by assisting them realize several self-sustaining programs like construction of toilet facilities. These would be equipped with bio-digesters to generate biogas, which can be then used for communal cooking and heating – users would pay only a small fee which could help building taller gabions along the river in Korogocho.