ALAIS OLE-MORINDAT
Director of APW’s ACTIVE™ Programme
“Our role is to unveil approaches and tools for creating and sustaining hope and action”
African People & Wildlife (APW) partners with local people to protect vulnerable wildlife and critical habitats while uplifting rural livelihoods. In September 2023, representatives and partners of the Aid by Trade Foundation participated in an ACTIVE™ community engagement training programme by APW in Tanzania. In this interview, Alais Ole-Morindat, the director of APW’s ACTIVE programme, explains why projects can only succeed if local people are involved and how data collection can help.
Mr Ole-Morindat, based on your experience, why is it critical to work with communities active in agriculture in Africa, and how is African People and Wildlife (APW) successfully transform-ing ways of working with others?
For any agribusiness programme, it is essential to truly respect communities’ knowledge and experiences as well as their culture, values, and traditions. The APW ACTIVE Community Engagement approach was developed as a cornerstone of nature conservation and development in APW’s field programmes. The Active Community Engagement approach offers practical methods, tools, and strategies for organisations to create and sustain meaningful and mutually beneficial relationships with local people. It enhances field practitioners’ potential for developing frameworks and a range of programmes and interventions supporting community livelihoods. This is pursued with the goals of improving the management of natural resources, conserving wildlands and biodiversity, sustaining ecosystems’ dynamics and resilience, and enhancing people’s quality of life.
Monitoring, evaluation, learning, and adaptation are an important part of APW’s work. Could you please explain why? How do you combine traditional knowledge with modern technology?
APW uses the Esri data collection system (EDC) to empower communities through data. The EDC is designed specifically to capture data derived directly from community sources and to make it available for integration in downstream analytical processes. This approach is powerful as it helps APW and partners to determine whether a project has achieved its intended objectives through analysis of evidence. It also plays a role in collecting lessons on human–wildlife conflicts, rangelands work, and climate adaptation investments and in assessing the project’s efficacy, best practices, and resilience building as well as, crucially, its value for money.
When a group of CmiA partners came to Tanzania to learn about ACTIVE Community Engagement, what commonalities did you see in the work of CmiA and APW, and what was your main takeaway?
APW and CmiA both respect and embrace the whole-society model of development, which sees people as drivers of any meaningful development process that concerns their lives. Both organisations also recognise that our main role is to catalyse change by facilitating conservation and development. Our role is to unveil approaches and tools for creating and sustaining hope and action no matter what the obstacles may be. Finally, APW and CmiA believe that community engagement is means and end, as it meets one of the principal needs of human beings.
Imagecredit: Emily Paul/African People & Wildlife
ALAIS OLE-MORINDAT
Director of APW’s ACTIVE™ Programme
“Our role is to unveil approaches and tools for creating and sustaining hope and action”