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Drougama, Région de Tombouctou, Mali
2010 - 2024
Short description
The Mali Elephant Project (MEP) works to protect an iconic elephant population across 42,000km2 through pioneering a holistic landscape approach to peaceful coexistence. It helps local communities create governance structures to manage natural resources, enabled by decentralisation legislation. It facilitates dialogue between stakeholders, and the development of consensual, transparent solutions to protect and restore habitat, at local and commune level; reinforced by protected area legislation. These environmental governance systems protect habitat and elephants, restore over-exploited, degraded ecosystems, improve local livelihoods, provide respected occupations for youth, opportunities for women, and reinforce social cohesion. The result is a more resilient social and ecological system.
Main purpose
Biodiversity conservation / restoration,
Land restoration for increased soil fertility / reversal of land degradation,
Reduced human-wildlife conflicts,
Prevention / control of forest and bush fires,
Reduced environmental degradation from sustainable resource use,
Climate adaptation / resilience,
Increased stocks for fishing and hunting,
Provision / protection / diversification of employment and livelihoods / poverty reduction,
Land tenure equality and security,
Reducing competition for natural resources,
Reduced illegal resource exploitation / poaching,
Increasing community cohesion / community building
Other expected benefits
Erosion control / slope stabilization,
Water infiltration / groundwater replenishment,
Climate change mitigation / capture of greenhouse gases,
Protect / restore cultural, spiritual, or religious assets,
Gender equality,
Strengthening indigenous culture,
Transparency and accountability of decision-makers,
Entry point for dialogue and mediation between conflicting groups,
Effective conflict mediation and resolution mechanism,
Trust building between conflicting groups,
Protection of forcibly displaced persons and returnees
Conflict context
Since 2011, the Gourma region has become lawless as the government has retracted. Fighting occurs between various armed groups on a regular basis. There are seperatist groups, government militaries, Jihadists, Russia’s African Forces which is employed by the government, as well as bandits and traffickers. These groups fight for control of the region and over valuable resources. While the conflict is often portrayed as an ethnic one, many local communities have their own peacebuilding mechanisms which are disrupted by larger armed forces.
Peace and security contributions
This solution promotes social cohesion because all parts of the community come together to first discuss the challenges they face and their causes. They realise that they all have the same challenges creating unity, a shared perception of the problems. At this point they can be asked to devise solutions and what is required to ensure that the solutions work. MEP conducted surveys to understand local perceptions of well-being and multi-dimensional security. Replies included many elements but finding food, water and fuel for their families and livestock were top priority. All of these depend on healthy, non-degraded and productive ecosystems. The empowerment of being able to create and enforce environmental governance systems was highly valued as an element of security and social cohesion.
Reported elements of good practices
- Initial studies that take a systemic approach to understand the conservation problem in its wider social-economic-political context.
- Identify, support and weave together aspects of the context that promote the vision, such as Mali’s decentralisation legislation, key individuals, traditional practices; and build from these rather than immediately introducing external “solutions”.
- Neutral facilitation by a local team that listens first to understand local perceptions, values and challenges using dialogue to co-create a shared vision and solutions.
- Local communities retain the ultimate decision-making power, giving them ownership and responsibility for inclusive, transparent and equitable structures to correct the failure in governance; all supported by protected area legislation.
Reported challenges
The insecurity and lawlessness is the obvious huge challenge for operations but also led to high poaching levels, however the project’s actions have brought this down to near zero. The insecurity makes everything more difficult and expensive as MEP has to find logistical ways to deliver the same results while protecting the project field team. It makes it more difficult to raise funds; communicate results; find local staff with adequate skills; and collect the scientific data required to demonstrate impact. The structure of donor reporting does not easily accommodate solutions that empower local communities to take responsibility, and work in rural areas as remote as these. The short-term nature of grants is a problem when dealing with issues that require medium-long term engagement.
Practical details of implementation
While we have not done formal analyses of the conflict context and gender inclusivity, these kinds of analyses are being done all the time as part of the team’s approach to its work, because they are crucial considerations when planning activities to ensure that the activities work and are sustainable. The team members are all from the area, and understand the situation intimately. The UK team brings the international context and perspective. The solution itself is robust to an increase in conflict so long as the increase doesn’t mean that local communities flee the area because their livelihoods are improved by the solution and the activities are their daily activities.
Method of monitoring environmental and peace impacts
Monitoring the environmental impacts of the project has been difficult due to the high levels of insecurity. It has not been possible for foreign researchers to enter the area since 2011 and local people with sufficient education have mostly left. Furthermore, training new staff in monitoring techniques is often not possible because the use of electronics such as cameras and GPS puts researchers in danger as they will be perceived as spies by various armed groups. Some researchers simply use pen and paper, although this is only safe in some areas. To overcome these challenges, we are starting to use remote sensing, as the resolution of available images is increasing. We also use anecdotal evidence which we obtain through informal and open conversations with local communities.
While local communities are fluid, making it difficult to set up structures for monitoring the social impact of our project, some communities have been involved since the beginning. Several people in these communities have been trained to conduct social suverys through interviews. They ask about local perceptions of different aspects of their security situation. There is a lot of local expertise that we rely on.
Futher reading
Contact details
susan.canney@biology.ox.ac.uk