Local Communities and the Wechiau Hippo Sanctuary, Ghana

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Thinking points

• As we also see in Gosh in Armenia and in the Danube Delta in Romania, the setting up of protected areas, usually in remote places like these, often means that local people to have to give up livelihood activities which are important to them. What do you think about this - how do we balance the needs of conservation and the needs of human communities?
• In Ghana, as in other parts of Africa, there is a collective system of land tenure in which the ultimate `owner' is the paramount chief of the `landowning' tribe. Quite often, this tribe is not the same as that of the people living in an area, and decisions can be made which are not entirely in the interests of the `tenant' tribe, as has happened with the Wechiau hippo sanctuary. How should outside bodies like those who set up the hippo sanctuary deal with complex land tenure situations like this?
• The people of Telewona want a school, to give them the means to find out about the rest of the world and get in touch with people in other places. Think about the role that education plays in increasing the possibility of information flow and communication between remote communities and the outside world.
• If you were a visitor, would you like to stay in a Lobi home rather than a tourist lodge, even if it is very different from what you are used to? Would you be interested only in the hippo sanctuary or in the lives of the local people?

Setting the scene

The Wechiau hippo sanctuary is near the town of Wa in the Upper West region of Ghana. It's a stretch of river about 40 km long, with a 1½ km strip each side of the bank, which was set up in 1997 and is run by a Peace Corps volunteer. A few tourists now visit the sanctuary and Earthwatch volunteers visit a couple of times a year to assist scientists who carry out studies of various kinds based at Wechiau. The Lobi people, with a few Hausa and Dagaata fishermen, live in the area immediately around the sanctuary. But the land itself belongs to another tribe - the Wala - and the Lobi pay tribute to the Wala chief for the land they use.

While the Wala community of Wechiau, after which the sanctuary is named, is connected with the outside world through its market, its access to education through its school, and the trading activities of its inhabitants, Lobi communities in the sanctuary area have lives which are much more remote. This is not only because the roads are bad - it's because they have no schools to learn to read and write and to learn English, the language used in education and trade in Ghana, and because they don't have markets of their own but travel to those of Wala communities. Lobi children almost never leave their villages, and even adults only go rarely to market, since this usually means going on foot, which takes several hours to the nearest market. Lobi livelihoods are related closely to the natural resources around them - they grow crops and use wild resources from the land and the river.

Although the sanctuary is described as a community initiative, the community which has been involved in setting up and running the sanctuary is not the people who live in the sanctuary area but the Wala, the `landlords' of the area. The Wala have benefitted from the sanctuary in terms of employment much more than the Lobi, although a few Lobi, Hausa and Dagaata are now employed there. Lodges have been built for visitors, so the Lobi unfortunately don't make money by putting up visitors in their homes.

Local livelihoods and the sanctuary

Hippos are a sacred animal for the Lobi, and so they support their protection. They believe themselves to be closely connected to hippos in various ways, including as messengers to their ancestors. However, they have lost out from the setting up of the sanctuary - they've been excluded from using the river for a number of livelihood activities. The handful of Dagaata and Hausa fishermen in the area have been stopped from doing any more fishing, though they have been given caretaking roles at the sanctuary, and they earn some money acting as boatmen for visitors (see panorama).

We visited Telewona, a Lobi village near one of the visitors' lodges, to meet some of the people and find out how feel about the sanctuary, and we went down to see the river itself. In Telewona, we met Suleimani and his family. Suleimani is one of the few Lobi who has a new job as a ranger at the sanctuary. Like all Lobi, he lives in a large and complex household with his two wives, his brothers and their wives (see panorama). He and his wife Insip told us that they are very pleased about the money and the bicycle he is getting. But Dauba Diri and Abena, his brothers' wives, told us that they were not happy about not being able to use the sanctuary area, and in particular about not being able to collect oysters any more, which are important sources of food and are also something to sell in the market. Abena told us that: `we are organizing to send a word to the people who are managing the place to allow us to do oyster collection.'

But Abena, and all of the children we talked to, were hopeful that maybe the sanctuary would mean that Telewona might get a primary school. All the people we spoke to in the village were keen to communicate with the visitors and to find out about the outside world - at the moment the Lobi are almost all illiterate and cannot speak English, the language used in education and trade in Ghana. Abena told us `I would be very happy if I could speak English and I could always speak to visitors to understand their living and their way of doing things and we could communicate very well'. We visited Wechiau, the Wala community which is the headquarters of the sanctuary, to meet the chief of the village, Wechiau Na, and also talked to Grungu Na, the financial secretary of the sanctuary (see panorama). He too emphasised his hope that the Lobi may get schools.

Friends of Wechiau website