Yesterday saw the completion of our research assistant retreat at Afia Beach hotel in Accra. After 8 months of survey work, I was glad to spend a couple days with Patrick and Victor looking over the work that had been done, ironing out the kinks, sharing strategies and challenges, and relaxing a little bit together. We had planned to convene the previous week but, in normal African fashion, Victor came down with malaria the morning of, and we made a last minute cancellation so he could properly battle the fatigue and nausea.

We convened in Accra Friday evening, checked into the hotel, and teased Victor about his malarial weight loss before heading out for dinner. Victor, who lives north of Accra was interested in a local Chinese food place. For Patrick, who lives in the Western Region in a smaller town, this was his first experience of Chinese food and he was dubious to say the least. He ordered shrimp fried rice–probably the most similar dish on the menu to traditional Ghanaian food– and it was declared delicious and a success. What was less successful was Patrick and Victor’s attempts to use chopsticks– some improvement could be had on that front.

We woke Saturday and from 9am until 4pm we refined our survey, shared interview pitfalls and transportation horror stories, laughed at anecdotes from various villages, discussed strategies with respondents, and made a plan for the work in the next few months. We talked about my goals for the research and discussed their goals for professional development and the future beyond the project. We had a wonderful time, and I’m so grateful for such an amazing team, with their honesty, their sense of humor, and their unflagging hard work. Survey work is challenging, and always iterative, and I couldn’t do any of it without them.

In June 2014 I returned to Mfangano Island in Lake Victoria in Kenya for my third summer. My goals were to support the second year of data collection, oversee data management, and facilitate a breast milk assessment while going fishing and eating Nile perch, dagaa, and tilapia. This work contributes to the Research on Environmental and Community Health (RECH- meaning “fish” in the local language, Dholuo) study on the island in collaboration with the Kenya Medical Research Institute and Organic Health Response. The purpose of the RECH study is to assess how changes in fishery access impact fishing activities, household food security, nutrition, and child development. Such changes exist with a backdrop of fishery productivity declines, despite initial industry boons. In the 1950s non-native Nile perch and tilapia were introduced into Lake Victoria, leading to one of the largest extinctions in recent history and greatly altering the ecology of the lake. The RECH study seeks to understand some of these effects and impacts.

To capture what RECH looks like in the field, I will share my experiences from witnessing a week in the life of a remarkable fieldworker.

A week in the life of a RECH fieldworker, Vicdonea.

July 14-20 was a busy week for the RECH team and my summer fieldwork. During these seven days I spent a lot of time with Vicdonea, a fieldworker who I trained, visited study households with, shared meals with, and who taught me invaluable lessons about Mfangano Island life and my own values.

Day 1: Breast Milk Assessment Training

The week started off with a training I led for the fieldworkers on a breast milk assessment that is being undertaken to fully understand children’s diets and the influence of maternal fish consumption on fatty acids in breast milk. The introduction of this assessment elicited a lot of questions and concerns ranging from how measuring breast milk is related to the environment and fish, to why fatty acids in breast milk are important to mothers, and how we are going to collect a few drops of breast milk. Vicdonea, a new breastfeeding mother, raised a lot of questions about how challenging it may be for women to express the milk and shared potential discomforts that could arise.

By the end of the day these questions were answered, but I learned that this assessment was going to involve more mobilization, community education, and logistical support than I anticipated. While I was there to provide technical input, I was dependent on the field staff to provide me with cultural insight and potential barriers to successfully carrying out the assessment. The day started off with me instructing the fieldworkers and ended with a brainstorming session facilitated by the team on how to best help the community we are working in by making them feel comfortable participating in our research and allowing them to reap the benefits of our findings.

Day 2: Pilot Preparations

Throughout the RECH study, the field team and community have been educated on proper nutrition and the importance of breastfeeding. When Vicdonea gave birth to Josephine a few months prior, she expressed concern about how she would breastfeed while working, especially in light of the absence of a breast milk pump and refrigeration. She said she was grateful for the job which not only provided her with means to care for her child, but also with information about how to help Josephine grow properly. Therefore, her time spent in the field was reduced and she was set to spearhead the breast milk assessment.

On July 15, Vicdonea tried different ways of expressing the few drops of breast milk herself as we revised the breast milk assessment protocol. We also created notes about how the team could help mothers feel comfortable and educate them, while addressing cultural taboos. Once Vicdonea finalized and translated the documents, we planned a pilot to test our methodology and learn about challenges we may face.

Day 3: Field Adventures

On July 16, I accompanied Vicdonea to the field (to visit households and survey them) as she was assigned four households to visit near the research center so she could still take a break and breastfeed Josephine. By now the RECH study was more than half complete and we were visiting households for the seventh time. Two years earlier when the RECH study began, I trained Vicdonea on child development and how to measure nutrition. Now she was teaching me how to effectively assess child growth in homes on Mfangano Island. Each family we visited knew Vicdonea and welcomed us warmly into their homes for about 1.5 hours offering us tea and mandazi, despite their food insecurity. Vicdonea went through questionnaires with the mother, fisherman, farmer, and child in Dholuo while I helped her fill in forms.

Day 4: Pilot

Thursday Vicdonea and I led a pilot study for the breast milk assessment as seven women from the community came to give us a few drops of milk. The female field staff practiced collecting the milk and helping the women understand the purpose of the assessment while coaching them in milk expression.

Day 5: Weekly Research Meeting

Fridays research meetings are held with the field staff. Vicdonea shared experiences from the pilot and revised the protocol. The team also began to solidify plans for mobilization and sharing the assessment with the community.

Day 6: Fishing and Farming

On Saturday I had the opportunity to witness Vicdonea’s life outside of work. In the morning while she was cleaning the house, I went fishing with her husband. He fishes for tilapia to supplement their income. I was interested to learn that he prefers to sell the few fish he catches rather than keep them in the family for consumption as they are a source of good nutrition. In the afternoon, Vicdonea went to her farm up a hill to harvest maize and ward off monkeys that often come and eat the crops that her family relies on for the coming year. She does this with Josephine on her back and breast.

Day 7: Chores and Closure

Vicdonea woke early on Sunday to go to church with her family and friends after washing the previous night’s dishes and bathing at the lake. Then we went to the market to buy food and goods for the proceeding week as it was the weekly market day. I saw how she bargained for omena and sukuma wiki, the nutritious foods that I am studying. In the afternoon, we parted as we both had laundry to do lakeside. I had an early dinner with the family hosting me, dancing with the children, and saying grace before savoring our ugali. I finally went to sleep alongside the rest of the electricity-free communities on Mfangano as the sun sank, omena boats lit up the horizon, and stars shot.

The week was tiring and I didn’t have nearly as many responsibilities as Vicdonea. Despite having a family and house to take care of in rural conditions and a newborn to attend to, she was always efficient at work and smiling. She shared with me how touched she has been by some of the participants’ growing care for their child’s health resulting from the RECH study. She was also grateful for the knowledge and skills she has gained that are helping Josephine grow strong and her to be a leader in the community. While this shadowing experience gave me cultural insight and a peer into daily life on Mfangano while studying the RECH domains, it also exposed me to the secondary benefits of our project and how much there is to learn from the beautiful people of Mfangano Island.

In closing, I would like to thank our hard-working, dedicated, and inspiring field team, and my host family for providing me with adequate nutrition throughout my visit and indescribable dance moves.

Tonight I said farewell to Maya, my undergraduate research assistant, who has been traveling with me through coastal Ghana for the last three weeks. Maya and I have been working together since February—when she was hired through the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) at Berkeley—on a database from information collected during my fieldwork last year. The data includes records of interactions at sea between industrial and artisanal fishing boats in coastal Ghana, and many of them include rare information on the nature of these interactions—some cooperative and friendly, some violent or criminal.

The purpose of our work the last two weeks: to revisit the reports from the database, fill in missing information, and uncover reports not previously recorded from the archives, reaching back to the 1950s. The work had us spending a few days in Accra, a week in the fishing port in Tema, a week in the fisheries office in Takoradi, and a final last night by the beach in Busua. While archive work may not be the most glamorous field work in Sub-Saharan Africa, going through the archives has provided an incredible lens into the changes that both the fisheries resources and marine resource governance have undergone in Ghana in the last thirty-plus years.

Ghana is one of the largest fishing countries in West Africa, and Ghanaians rely on fish for over 50% of their animal protein intake—as compared to a global average of 15%. Fisheries are also a major contributor to income and employment in the area, and the most recent FAO State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (2104) has Ghana employing 385,000 fish processors, most of whom are women. Yet even within this context, the majority of industrial fishing boats are owned and operated largely by foreign nations, and the interactions between this sector and the artisanal sector present uniquely difficult challenges for resource management and conservation. While many of these challenges require specific strategies of resource governance, a necessary first step is to gain a better understanding of how each sector contributes to resource harvesting, and how they work—or don’t work—together.

We hope the research we’re currently working on will help characterize both the social and ecological impacts of fishing in Ghana and contribute critical information to some of the stickier aspects of marine resource governance.

Ghana’s Community Resource Management Area (CREMA) program is designed to help those living on the outskirts of national parks to create a buffer for the protected area, largely by reducing illicit activities like hunting and tree-cutting. In theory, the Ghana Wildlife Division (GWD) is supposed to reward these communities for monitoring and losing income from restricted forest use by helping them to develop “alternative livelihood” activities. By combining trainings on activities like fish pond farming and beekeeping with conservation education in these communities, the Wildlife Division hopes that the CREMAs will become self-sustaining entities over time.

In practice, however, the results of the CREMAs around Ankasa Reserve in Ghana’s southwest suggest there are still many barriers to achieving these aims. It is important to note that most of the nine CREMAs around Ankasa have formed within the last five years, so some of the challenges may be attributable to growing pains. Given the formative stage of the CREMAs, now could be a useful moment to consider a couple of these hurdles and means to overcome them.

Promoting viable, widespread alternative livelihood activities is particularly daunting. There are a few major obstacles to the CREMA communities gaining the livelihood benefits they often say they were “promised.”

The first is the basic fact that learning new skills takes time and effort and pulls them away from where most of them are making their money, which is on their cocoa farms. For those who don’t have cocoa land, these opportunities might offer good alternatives, but they appear too inconsistently to offer reliable income over time.

The second is that most of the activities require a capital investment. Ghana’s Wildlife Division and its NGO partners are willing to put up money for the training, and occasionally some pilot initiatives, but beyond that, community members must cover costs themselves. This means that usually only the wealthiest benefit, because they are also the ones who can put in the time and money to set up new ventures like fish farming. In one instance, a group of women were trained to make bamboo handicrafts, but they had to give up because they lacked the savings to feed their families for the first couple of months that they would be creating handicrafts to sell. If only the well-off receive livelihood benefits, it is hard to imagine that the rest of the community would be excited about carrying out the work required for monitoring and enforcing the CREMA rules.

A fishpond created by a CREMA member with technical support provided via the CREMA program. This member had the funding and land to build and maintain a fishpond, but few CREMA members could afford to undertake this activity on their own.

Third, the GWD is not a development agency and lacks the resources to be one for the 58 communities that are part of their CREMAs around Ankasa. While the GWD team has worked diligently to attract NGOs and private investors for various projects, it has been difficult to do so with any consistency. Where they are able to rustle up resources, distrust and jealousy builds based upon who is given access to those limited resources.

Finally, another overarching challenge to the CREMA program is related to this last issue of trust. All of the individuals I spoke to who were not on CREMA committees for their community or larger CREMA – and even some who were – expressed dismay about the work of the CREMA leadership and suggested that new elections were needed to revive their CREMA. In one community, the chief noted: “The CREMA executives don’t carry out their monitoring duties, so why should the rest of us take it seriously?” In another, townspeople complained that the executives never told them about livelihood trainings, and believed that the committee members were trying to restrict access to these opportunities so that they could receive more personal benefits. Such mistrust has been reinforced by incidents like a CREMA chairman being caught poaching. Suspicion about the value of the CREMA has also built up in the form of failed rotating loan schemes (the first people given fertilizer never paid their loan off) and “community” projects from which only a few have benefitted. Finally, there is still a level of mistrust among community members about the Wildlife Division, especially in the realm of trees. As there is historical precedent for the Forestry Commission, of which the Wildlife Division is a part, giving away timber concessions and trees on the land of community members for revenue, many remain concerned about the motivations of the Wildlife Division in promoting activities like tree planting.

Where to begin addressing these challenges? As a start, Wildlife Division officers might consider switching out short term trainings in capital-intensive alternative livelihoods for tools that help CREMA members to be more successful at their primary livelihood – farming – and reduce pressure on local natural resources at the same time. Examples include working with agricultural extension officials to help farmers to begin creating and using organic fertilizer, a fairly simple practice that can yield impressive productivity results and make farmers less reliant on other expensive and harmful chemical fertilizers. Developing a community supply of farming tools like pruning shears could also go a long way toward improving farm productivity.

More fundamentally, however, there are national laws and enforcement issues that will continue to hinder the CREMA program if they are not addressed. In particular, the longstanding law that says that Ghana’s President owns all the trees is a hindrance to the communities benefitting from trees. In addition, the Timber Resource Management Act of 1997, which prevents the national government from giving away timber or mine concessions without the approval of local people, needs to be more consistently enforced.

It is also important for the Wildlife Division and its community partners to be realistic and honest about what the CREMAs can and cannot do, and clarify roles and responsibilities of everyone involved. In each community I visited with the Wildlife Division, community leaders said that the presence of the officers had reignited their initiative to revive the CREMA program. Yet the three officers have 58 communities to cover. If they visited a couple communities every Monday through Friday, they would only get to each community — many of which are hours from their office on difficult roads — about 10 times each year. There was also widespread disillusion with the level of income that the CREMAs had generated to date, which suggested that the communities may have had outsized expectations for what the Wildlife Division and its partners could bring, while failing to recognize that the funding sources are designed to be generated internally through hunting licenses, fines, dues, and community timber management.

The conservation education efforts associated with the CREMAs seem to have had an impact on CREMA members: all expressed recognition of the importance of animals and trees when asked what they’ve learned from the CREMA program. If the CREMA concept is to be sustainable, though, in the way that GWD hopes, people in the communities must believe in its benefits enough to find ways to generate internal funds. In time- and financially- strapped communities like those around Ankasa, that is a tall order, and may be the biggest challenge to the concept’s long-term success. As such, it may well be the most important piece for the Wildlife Division staff to help communities with right now. By developing a pool of internal funds and organizing the institutions and processes for its distribution, the CREMAs will be able to support some of the activities that are currently unviable. This can create a positive feedback loop, whereby CREMA members have greater incentives to carry out monitoring and enforcement activities that can in turn help generate additional funds. Only if the CREMAs become truly internally financially sustainable are they likely to be helpful to the communities in the long term while having the intended conservation impact the GWD seeks.

This is one in a series of posts by PhD Student and BHL participant Lauren Withey, based on her time looking at rural natural resource management in Ghana in the summer of 2013. 

The Western Region of Ghana, in the country’s tropical southwest, has attracted settler farmers since before most of its current residents can recall. The land supports coffee, cocoa, coconuts, oil palm, and foodstuffs like cassava and maize. Though farmers in the 1930s pulled up their coffee when they couldn’t find buyers for their beans, and cocoa faced similar challenges prior to Ghana’s independence, the region has consistently held an important role in the country’s GDP. Cocoa is by far the biggest earner for residents today – Ghana is second only to the Ivory Coast in global cocoa exports, and the cocoa from Ghana is said to be some of the finest quality cocoa in the world.

On my trip to Ghana over the summer of 2013, I spoke with two village elders in Cocoatown, along Ghana’s southern border with Cote d’Ivoire, about the changes they had witnessed in their community. The men are now in their early 80s, still fit from long days on their cocoa farms. They and their parents were born in Cocoatown. Our conversation revealed some of the challenges of squeezing ever more people on ever smaller, and less productive, land.

The decline in soil fertility over their lifetimes was the one major change that both men noted about the land:  “Now we have to use fertilizer. Ten years ago, I hadn’t even heard of fertilizer,” one notes. “We used shifting cultivation for many years, but we can’t do that any longer. Now the land is too scarce.” He says his parents’ cocoa trees, now over 90 years old, are still producing because they were well sited beside the river. The tree variety, Tetteh Quarshie – named after the man who introduced cocoa to Ghana in the late 1870s –, is different from those used currently, producing smaller, thicker pods. On the upland, shadeless soils that cocoa farmers rely on today as land competition grows, hybrid trees produce for only twenty years before they peter out. These hybrid trees also face a variety of diseases, including Black Pod rot and Swelling Shoot disease.

Deforestation was another major change the men mentioned. “Now there’s almost nothing left of the original forest.” The solution of Ghana’s national government to the rapid deforestation of some of the most biodiverse forest in the world was to create a national park in the area that farmers would be forbidden to encroach upon. The elders described the difficulties the gazettement of the Ankasa park in 1976 posed for their communities: “We used to use that forest for food, for medicine, for building materials. Now we felt like we had nothing. Many people were upset.” While communities were able to rely for a time on off-reserve forests for these needs, these, too, were quickly depleted. Today, the men explained, those products they had relied on from the forest are imported, or, in the case of certain traditional medicines, simply unavailable.

The loss of virgin forest around farms hasn’t been all bad, though, according to the men: “We used to have trouble with the monkeys eating our cocoa, but now they stay in the forest reserve and don’t bother us.” What of other wildlife in the region? “We see most of the same things we used to see, but not as much.” Grasscutters, squirrels, duikers, antelopes, snakes were among those mentioned as making regular appearances. They noted that most members of their community were happy to join the “Community Resource Management Area (CREMA)” program offered by the Ghana Wildlife Division. “We knew pretty soon it would all be used up if we didn’t stop the hunting,” one of the elders explained.

Pressure on local land is only growing. Most of the young farmers I spoke with have had some trouble coming by their land, often leasing it from another farmer, or owning just a few acres. This differs from the decades over which chiefs in the region gave land to settlers in exchange for a bottle of gin. Only one of the farmers I spoke to in my two weeks in the region, though, had fewer than three children – all the rest had between 6 and 13. How will these smaller lands be divided between so many competing claims? When I put this question to young parents in the area, they express concern. They know their lands can’t sustain their whole family, but school fees are high, and the quality of schools in these rural areas make it difficult for their children to compete academically or in other jobs with those from urban districts.

When I ask the community elders, however, they are optimistic. Asked what they thought the young children in local communities might do when they grew up, they reply, “Farming, just as they always have. A few might go to school and get white collar jobs, or a few might go into industry if we get good industry here, but mostly they will farm.”

Perhaps what the elders mean is that the people of their community will make it work, as they have for decades – through trials like the loss of their land to the national park and the collapse of the coffee market. There will be winners and losers in the transitions, but agriculture will continue to be an important part of the region’s future. The challenge, then, in addition to developing alternative paths for the region’s young people, is for these communities and the local and national government supporting them, to find ways to make this agriculture as sustainable as possible and beneficial to as many people as possible.

This is one in a series of posts by PhD Student and BHL participant Lauren Withey, based on her time looking at rural natural resource management in Ghana in summer of 2013. 

We were invited into the living room of the President of the fokontany, or municipality, where we would spent the next few days before heading back to our house in Maroantsetra. After two weeks spent visiting three villages in order to try to understand a bit about the diversity of livelihoods and forest management and use surrounding the newest and largest of Madagascar’s Natural Parks, this introduction to our fourth stop of the trip was notable. First of all, the fact that it had a living room was notable. The house itself, though larger than others we had visited, was not unlike the houses of the wealthier residents of various villages. It was made from hardwood from the forest surrounding the village, rather than raffia or bamboo, with a corrugated metal roof brought up river six hours by canoe from Maroantsetra, the main port and city in this corner of the island. We sat on furniture made of precious hardwood, the first sofas we encountered. In the corner stood a couple of two meter long forestry saws and in the back room were goony sacks filled with unhulled rice, from the last crop to be harvested. Aside from farming, which is nearly everybody’s first occupation, the president also works construction, building houses for residents of the town, buying his wood from residents who harvest it from the forest they have rights to, passed down through the last 2 or 3 generations or newly acquired.

The second set of sofas we saw were at the house of the man who owns the machine that hulls the rice. Most people in the surrounding area, and throughout much of Madagascar rely of large mortar and pestles to hull their rice little by little and sell what they can in the hulled form. In this town, though it costs a bit to use, people have access to a hulling machine, run on a generator with diesel brought up river again by canoe. In return for 50 ariary (2.5 cents), they receive rice that is fit for consumption and ready to be rebagged and either eaten or shipped back down on the canoes to Maroantsetra where it fetches about 400 ariary more per kilo than the unhulled rice.

The one person we met that didn’t see himself as a farmer first was the school teacher of this town. He had grown up in the area and had returned to teach there after studying. His wife runs a store in the front of their house to provide the necessities for everyday life in the village. In addition to the teaching and selling incomes, he also works as a carpenter, buying planks and rounds of hardwood trees from local loggers to fill his commissions for beds, chests and yes, sofas.

Ambodihazomami is well endowed with rice paddies and only recently have they began also cultivating the slopes surrounding the village.

The above anecdote illustrates a number of aspects of the political economy of rural life here. A utilization of the forest for both commercial and subsistence purposes that is fueling both a local market for luxury goods and a transformation of agricultural technology that is allowing for export to the administrative hub. As apparent in the above photo, this town is surrounded by a significant amount of rice paddy. It was interesting to talk with folks about the changes in land use over time. I was told that up until about 20 years ago they had only planted rice once per year and that it sufficed. But as the population has grown and inheritances of rice paddies being divided between the children has shrunk them, they moved to planting twice per year. As of three years ago or so, they began also farming rice on the hills, which requires cutting the trees and burning the soil. One of those that I talked to, who makes a living from timber, thinks that people should be trying to improve their techniques of paddy rice farming instead. And others worry that there just isn’t enough land, and that the new protected area to their North will have to be used by the next generation.

This situation stands in contrast to the two other villages we visited during this mission, which had began working with the conservation NGO in charge of the protected area to create community managed conservation zones to act as a buffer. Neither of them had as much paddy land, being in narrower valleys. They both had extensive use of the hillside for rice farming such that the immediate slopes surrounding the villages were mostly cultivated rather than left as forest. In both villages they are no longer longer permitted to harvest timber for sale, and have to request permits to cut wood for their houses and to do agricultural clearings. In exchange, if they are diligent in their work, the conservation NGO provides development assistance in terms of latrines, metal roofs for schools, and nice, wood-paneled, metal roofed buildings for offices. There is some vanilla and cloves being grown and sold in all the villages but in a number of ways there seems to have been a basic trade off of timber for conservation in these two.

The hills around Andaparaty have been more heavily cultivated. The land in the foreground is newly returning to fallow.

At the end of our first mission, we have learned a great deal about the diversity of uses and economies related to land and the forest in this area. Eli, my field assistant, Gerandine, our camp steward, and I are spending the week caring for gear and doing data entry before heading out tomorrow for another few weeks of visiting villages. On the first mission we piloted household surveys to understand livelihoods strategies, perspectives on conservation and knowledge of forest use rules. We also talked to a number of community and conservation leaders to begin stratifying communities based on governance systems. On this next trip we will continue with that work while piloting forest use transects and vegetation plots. Next year then, when our survey effort really cranks up, we should be able to connect livelihood strategies and land use institutions to levels and types of forest use.

This is one in a series of posts by PhD Student and BHL participant Ryan Marsh, based on his time looking at rural natural resource management in Madagascar in the summer of 2013.