Support Women's WONDER Hubs in Tanzania

Greetings, 

While our Tanzanian and U.S. teams are currently busy writing grants for the WONDER Hub Project, the community women in Tanzania's Southern Highlands have been fully immersed in providing community outreach to neighboring villages. These outreach events cover topics under the One Health umbrella, spanning animal health, climate resilience, water health, and biodiversity protection. The community women regularly send us photos, offering glimpses into their weekly activities. This past week, the women of Itonya traveled to a nearby village, Uluti, to talk to local farmers about human-wildlife coexistence. This is a topic of great contention and interest for small-holder farmers of this region. Living so closely enmeshed with the land and surrounding wildnerness, farmers have frequent encounters with wildlife scavenging for food, drinking from the same watering holes, or simply migrating through the area.

While wildlife can be a source of national pride and generate money for tourism, they can also wreak havoc to crops, cause injury or death to villagers, and devastate small herds and flocks of animals. However, there is gradual awareness that wild animals also confer many benefits that keep ecosystems biodiverse and healthy. These benefits translate to healthier soil, carbon sequestration, maintenance of nutrient cycles, and clean air to breathe - all components that are fundamental to local livelihoods and wellbeing. Through outreach programs in local and surrounding communities, the women of Itonya and Mboliboli are providing a toolbox of implementable strategies (e.g., chili fences, scarecrows, and bee hive fences etc.) that deter wildlife from encroaching on their farmland. Ultimately, these cheap and simple techniques have been highly effective at keeping wildlife, as well as humans and their crops and animals, safe from harm. Programs such as this are critical to promoting human-wildlife coexistence. 

We hope to have more exciting news to report on this fall! As always, we appreciate your continued support and interest in this project. Stay tuned, we are on the cusp of some wonderful new developments.

Warmly,

Kate and the FOECOE / EVG Teams