The Western
Wildlife Coridor
IMPROVING ECOLOGICAL CONNECTIVITY
NORTHERN GHANA
Conservation Partners Ghana, a
non-governmental and non-profit organization engaged in natural resource conservation and advocacy, has developed a project that holds enormous potential to develop more efficient, collaborative, and coordinated natural resource management and conservation throughout the western wildlife corridor.
Conservation partners have created a high involvement community project to rebuild the lost forest cover, and raise conservation awareness.
Partner
UN Targets
Challenge
According to Ghana’s forest reference level report, between 2001 and 2015, the northern savannah zone of Ghana lost around 77 percent of its forest cover. The west life corridor is essential to migration of species and secure resilence of the ecosystems in this time of climate changes.
Solution—Results
Sustainable and inclusive economic development that responds to climate change and biodiversity
Natural resources are sustainably managed and resilient to climate change
Communities fully participate in the governance of their resources
Set up demonstration fields to practice climate change adaptation
Train 100 individuals from CREMAs to carry out participatory biodiversity monitoring
Train people in CREMAs to implement participatory resource inventories
Strengthen multi-stakeholder dialogue platforms
Ecological connectivity improved within the Western Wildlife Corridor
Support farmers to restore one hundred and fifty hectares of degraded shea parklands
Restore three hundred hectares of degraded woodlands
Support two-hundred farmers to integrate multi-purpose agroforestry trees
Improved livelihoods
Train and equip women engaged in the shea value chain
Establish cooperative fund to support shea start up businesses
Build warehouses for women shea cooperatives
Their concept aims to strengthen the participation of communities outside protected areas to manage and benefit from their resources, but also to train and empower them to carry inventories on their own guidance from the Wildlife Division of the Forestry Commission.
This project also strives to transform the shea market which holds huge potential of reducing endemic poverty in the shea belt of northern Ghana and engage women groups and community- based groups in the shea value chains by giving them integral roles in the process.
Impact
We mediate investment so:
— Five hundred women and fifty men are trained and engaged in non-timber forest product-based enterprises (shea, tamarind, and moringa);
— 300 ha of degraded woodlands are restored;
— Large amounts of carbon segregation– from 3000 tons to 5400 tons in the first year- are created by working with the soil and planting to secure forests;
— Locally driven and community-centered pathways to scale-up landscape restoration are created in order to establish ecological connectivity;
— Management and conservation of natural resources along the western wildlife corridor becomes sustainable, inclusive and resilient to climate change.
