Nomba Ganamé is the Head of Field Operations at the Mali Elephant Project and the recipient of this year’s prestigious Prince William Award for Conservation in Africa, a lifetime achievement award given to a distinguished individual for their outstanding dedication and exceptional contribution to conservation. An inspiring leader in the conservation community, Ganamé has dedicated his career to protecting one of the planet’s rarest natural treasures: Mali’s desert-adapted elephants. Under his leadership, the Mali Elephant Project has not only protected a highly vulnerable elephant population but also set an international example for community-driven, sustainable environmental management.
BACKGROUND
Ganamé began his career as a sociologist and rural development advisor on environment development projects, and later became the expert in local development and environmental management for a tri-country Elephants, Biodiversity Conservation, and Development GEF project. In this role, he guided project conception through commissioning and conducting studies, and organised and facilitated a national workshop on land and local resource management. During time spent at the German and French government bilateral aid organisations (GIZ and AFD), he specialised in land tenure and helped resolve long-running and highly explosive conflicts between resident agricultural peoples and migratory herders and the heavy environmental impacts of such conflicts. He met Susan Canney in 2006 during a series workshops on elephants and ecosystem management, and subsequently joined her at the Mali Elephant Project.
ABOUT THE SPECIES & THREATS
Mali’s iconic elephants are the northernmost population of African elephants, one of just two elephant populations adapted for deserts.They undertake the longest annual elephant migration in the world and live in an unforgiving landscape southeast of Timbuktu, enduring sandstorms and blistering temperatures. To survive and find food, water and refuge, the population has evolved a nomadic strategy that includes a migration spanning over 3 million hectares. As elsewhere, increasing human activity poses a severe threat to their future through habitat loss and fragmentation coupled with incremental degradation of the ecosystem through anarchic over-exploitation. These factors bring elephants into increasing competition and conflict with local people; while poaching has been an additional problem since 2012.
ACHIEVEMENTS
The Mali elephant population survives today due to Ganamé’s engagement of the local community.Without him, the elephants would have disappeared by mid-2019.
Ganamé has brought diverse communities together to collectively develop a sustainable grass-roots model of “elephant-centred”, community-led environmental management on a landscape scale. It’s an approach that makes space for elephants while improving local livelihoods. It is also a powerful tool for managing conflict and fostering coexistence.
His genius is to use resource-tenure laws together with traditional methods to protect and restore habitat through preventing over-exploitation. Representative management committees of elders set the rules and sanctions while teams of local youth, called ‘eco-guardians’, monitor the implementation of those rules as well as the elephants. They conduct habitat protection and restoration activities, creating hundreds of kilometres of fire-breaks each year, planting trees and restoring degraded land and protecting elephant migratory routes,
The goal is a thriving nature that forms the basis of local livelihoods, enables the return of wildlife and increases the resilience of the ecosystem to climate change.
He has further reinforced local action by co-developing an environmental governance architecture across 16 communes, covering 60,000km2. Mutually reinforcing governance structures at multiple scales create an “enabling” environment that encourages and supports sustainable, grassroots, community-led environmental management across the landscape.
His work has also been the inspiration for a new protected area of 42,000km2 covering the elephant range, zoned to further strengthen both strict habitat protection and environmental governance.
Ganamé’s work is driven by a powerful combination of deep humanity, wisdom, grounded creativity, and unyielding courage. He approaches the multiple challenges of this area with a determination to find innovative, lasting solutions, continually adapting until he finds a way. His deep understanding of the environmental, social, and economic complexities at play has made him an invaluable asset to the Mali Elephant Project. Ganamé is ready to do whatever it takes, however difficult or dangerous.
Visit Tusk Conservation Awards website
The Tusk Conservation Awards are held in partnership with Ninety One and in conjunction with H.R.H The Prince of Wales. The awards recognise cutting-edge conservation leaders and their positive impacts on wildlife conservation and local communities across Africa. For over a decade, the Tusk Conservation Awards have served as a springboard for these guardians of biodiversity, who have risen to the top of their fields. The Awards help to scale their work and increase conservation impact across the continent.
