Travel Blog

Goats for Gorillas, goats can protect gorillas, a project launched by Edwin Sabuhoro to help local people around the gorillas national park and in particular poachers to increase their livelihoods, family income, and linking them to directly benefit from tourism as an incentive for them to stop poaching and protect the gorillas amidst them.

Launched in January 2011, this project has been welcomed by local people around the park. The rationale is that every tourist who comes with Rwanda Eco-Tours, personally gives a goat to a family living near the park, and in particular a former poacher's family. 

This is celebrated at the Iby'iwacu Cultural Village and it is highly seen that by giving goats, tourists who will be trekking gorillas, will add to the contribution of conserving them by equipping the community with tools needed, among those, contributing to their economic welfare, thereby giving back to both local people and conservation of the resource that tourism depends on.

This project intended to change the trend and turn poachers to farmers for the production of food and surplus for sale an effective ground for conservation education and sensitisation. Each year communities in different associations save seeds to plant for the next season from what they have grown a sustainable element to keep the project benefiting and on going.

The main objective of the project is to create an alternative means to local people around gorillas’ national park with an alternative livelihood that will absent them from poaching of wildlife and degradation of mountain gorilla habitat.

Communities around the famous mountain gorilla's national park in Nyabigoma, Kinigi, Musanze district In the Northern Province supported by Rwanda Eco-Tours, have embraced the eco and cultural tourism concept by stopping poaching to raise their income levels through a participative approach as an incentive for conservation.

Having been poaching for centuries, given the human-wildlife conflicts around the park, communities have finally organised themselves to reap from their investment, the Iby'Iwacu Cultural Village, a concept that entails what gorilla trekkers have been missing, a place where people, culture and meet to appreciate the wonders of nature while meeting the history where the traditions still runs the modern world.

The News is publishing a series about Black Press reporter Colleen Dane’s recent trip to sub-Saharan Africa. Dane, a former News reporter now working at our sister paper in Courtenay, was the recipient of the Seeing the World Through New Eyes fellowship, funded by the Jack Webster Foundation and CIDA, and designed to introduce young reporters to international reporting. Her stories focus on development issues in Mozambique and Rwanda.

This is the final instalment.

Edwin Sabuhoro was horrified when, as an employee of Rwanda’s Parcs National des Volcans in 2005, he heard that a baby gorilla had been killed in the reserve, and was for sale for $2,000 American dollars.

He was sad and unbelieving. He was looking deep into the eyes of the person who reported the crime. Unfortunately he saw truth there and decided he had to find out for himself.

"Working Together for Our Wildlife"

Kwita Izina ceremony in Rwanda

The mountain Gorillas share with the human beings 98% of the genes and about a third of the world’s total mountain gorilla’s population live in Rwanda. The Rwanda Office of Tourism and National Park (ORTPN) and indeed the entire Rwandan community found it pertinent to extend the much cherished secular Rwandan tradition of naming every new born baby to the Gorillas as well.