Threatened: Mountain gorillas will come under increasing stress as global temperatures increase. Photo: Robert Haasmann
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka still remembers the day in 1999 that her work — and her worldview — shifted.
As Uganda’s first wildlife vet, and the only veterinary expert with any training in public health, she had been asked to lead health education workshops for communities living alongside mountain gorillas in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in south-western Uganda. It is home to just under half of the world’s mountain gorillas.
Kalema-Zikusoka, who had set up the first veterinary unit in the Uganda Wildlife Authority in 1996, came prepared with flipcharts and scientific explanations. She was ready to tell the 1 000 community members how the mountain gorillas had fallen ill from their community gardens — and what the solutions were.
But before she could begin, a park ranger stopped her. “He touched my hand and said, ‘Let’s hear what they have to say.’’’ She listened.
“And they actually came up with much better solutions than I was proposing to them,” Kalema-Zikusoka recalled. “I realised they may be poor and less educated than me but they know what works best for them. It was humbling and it inspired me a lot.”
The villagers’ ideas were simple but powerful: bring health services closer to their remote homes, strengthen the community volunteer teams that herd gorillas back to the forest when they stray into community gardens and hold regular health education workshops, not one-off sessions.
“It showed me the power of having an integrated approach … It inspired me to see how a multidisciplinary team could look at all these issues from all angles. And people were more convinced to follow it.”
That moment crystallised the philosophy that would define her career — and the pioneering conservation model she would go on to build.
Kalema-Zikusoka is the founder and chief executive of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), an award-winning Ugandan grassroots NGO that protects endangered gorillas and other wildlife through a One Health approach, linking the well-being of animals, people and their shared environment.
She was delivering a keynote address on integrating health and people in gorilla conservation at last week’s Oppenheimer Research Conference, where she spoke to the Mail & Guardian on the sidelines. The conference brought together researchers, policymakers and conservation leaders to advance African-led solutions to the biodiversity and climate crisis.
The One Health approach is essential to saving mountain gorillas from disease, she pointed out. “The animals are closely related to humans, sharing 98% of their genetic material, and [humans and mountain gorillas] can easily make each other sick.”
One of her first cases at the Ugandan Wildlife Authority was a fatal scabies outbreak in 1996 that afflicted the mountain gorillas. The primates were then critically endangered, with only about 650 left worldwide.
“It was traced to people living around the park, who had very little healthcare. Once the gorillas had lost the fear of humans, through habituation from tourism, they started to range in places that they had before tourism had begun … In the community land, they come across dirty clothing and scarecrows that people put out to chase away gorillas, baboons and other wildlife.”
The scabies outbreak was fatal for one infant gorilla while three others recovered after treatment with Ivermectin, she said. A few years later, another, larger, gorilla group also contracted scabies.
“They almost died but because the vets who attended to it really understood what happened, based on the experiences we had four years earlier, they were able to quickly give treatment.”
In 2000, Kalema-Zikusoka enrolled in a zoological medicine residency and master’s in specialised veterinary medicine at North Carolina Zoological Park and North Carolina State University.
Her master’s research on disease at the human-wildlife-livestock interface later became the foundation for CTPH, which she established in 2003, built on the conviction, sparked in that village meeting, that conservation only thrives when communities do too.
“What we do is we improve the health of the people, the gorillas and other wildlife and the well-being of the communities, especially in Africa because people are poor and poor healthcare is another dimension of poverty.
“And wherever you find wildlife, it’s normally in rural areas, where the health and social services are very limited. In these particular areas, you need to improve community health so the people don’t make the wildlife sick and so that they also don’t get diseases from wildlife because disease goes in both directions,” she noted.
Through the gorilla health and community conservation field lab, CTPH teams routinely collect samples from all habituated gorilla groups to test for intestinal parasites. “If we find they’re picking up human parasites, we deworm the people in the areas where they picked them from, and their livestock, when they [the mountain gorillas] go to community gardens,” she said.
The community is “happy when we tend to their health. They start to care more about the wildlife because we’re showing them that we also care about their health, which is a basic human right.”
Her teams promote family planning, refer people for testing and treatment of TB, HIV, Covid-19, scabies and other preventable diseases and teach good nutrition and sustainable agriculture.
“More recently, we started Ready to Grow where we give them fast-growing seedlings so they have something to eat, especially the most vulnerable homes, because if they have something to eat, especially if they have a cash crop like coffee or tea, or they have a job that brings a regular income, they are much less likely to enter the forest to poach.”
Her teams monitor gorilla health, test for disease and work with community volunteers — each responsible for about 30 homes — to promote hygiene and sanitation.
“They make sure that the communities are adopting handwashing stations after they use the toilets, that they have clean toilets, and actually have toilets, because open defecation is a big risk for the people, for the gorillas and other wildlife.
“We talk to communities about the benefits of tourism and how they can access tourism revenue,” she said. “We talk to them about the homes that are visited by gorillas so that the gorilla guardians can come and quickly herd them out before there is damage to people and their crops and conflict between the people and the gorillas.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic, CTPH worked with the Uganda Wildlife Authority, NGOs, tour operators and communities to prevent disease transmission between people and gorillas, while supporting livelihoods through Gorilla Conservation Coffee, a social enterprise for farmers near gorilla habitats.
The model is being expanded to biodiversity hotspots across Africa, addressing disease control, climate change and 11 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
The results speak for themselves. As the health and well-being of the local communities improve, so do their attitudes towards conservation. “The threats to the gorillas are reducing. They are falling sick less often from diseases in the local community and also there’s less poaching.”
The mountain gorilla population has more than doubled. The most recent census, in 2018, recorded 1 063 individuals — enough for the species to be downlisted from critically endangered to endangered.
“They’ve been showing a positive growth trend over the past 25 years; that’s why they were downlisted,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean they are out of danger because there are only 1 000 left in the world and a new census has been going on this year. Our teams are on the ground and we hope to count more.”
Still, there are challenges ahead. “They’re running out of space to grow. If we don’t do something soon, they’ll have nowhere to go,” warned Kalema-Zikusoka. Lodges are blocking the expansion of the gorillas and they are spending more time in community gardens, “which isn’t good”.
Yet, there is reason for optimism. “What’s made me hopeful is that people are willing to sell their land to us to expand the park. It’s just very expensive because it’s a tourist area. But they would rather sell it for the public good, for conservation, than to a private sector person, because that will have greater good in the long run.”
In the 22 years since she started her non-profit, Kalema-Zikusoka has seen more and more how the great apes are valued by the local communities who share their habitat.
“They are valued by their human neighbours because they are benefiting from the gorillas.
Their children understand that tourists have brought money, which is enabling them to be lifted out of poverty, and the gorillas are comfortable with the community members — that’s why they go to their gardens, which we don’t like …
“The fact that people care about them, the less likely they are to kill them or harm them if they come to their gardens. The gorillas have become part and parcel of the community’s future,” she added.