DRC-Salonga Project Begins
Augustine Kasambule’s extensive resume features her experience in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as a biologist, educator, administrator, producer and television journalist.
Jean-Paul Baziyaka is a young videographer/producer whose coverage across the DRC for national television and for the United Nations’ Congolese mission has included stories on war, refugees and elections.
Together, along with INCEF project manager, Saturnin Ibata, they make up the production team that is venturing into the Salonga National Park, the world’s second largest expanse of tropical forest area, located within the Salonga-Lukenie-Sankuru Landscape in the DRC’s west-central province of Equateur.
INCEF is partnering with landscape leader, World Wildlife Fund, and its Salonga partner, PACT, to take its video outreach and capacity building initiative into one of the most resource-rich but least accessible and most at-risk forests in Central Africa, if not the world.
Bushmeat, poaching and the related health issues are of grave concern in this protected area that is home to many diverse wildlife species including forest elephants and perhaps the largest population of Bonobo chimps. Land tenure and economic development issues are of enormous importance also, especially to the indigenous peoples for whom the Salonga region has been their traditional home.
The team heads out for its first research trip to speak with inhabitants at all levels in the community to determine the specific issues and effective arguments that will guide the production trips to follow and the subsequent outreach efforts with the education teams that are yet to be recruited.
Over the next couple of years the Salonga project will be another worthy test of INCEF’s philosophy that strategic communications must be an integral and primary component of any program designed to have impact on the health and well-being of human and wild species alike.
