This blog post was written by Paul Butler. Mr. Butler led Rare’s first Pride campaign in the late 1970’s to save the endangered St. Lucian parrot and continues his conservation leadership today as Rare’s Senior Vice President, Global Programs.
This is part four of a series of posts from Mr. Butler on his campaign visit to Andavadoaka in Madagascar. His first post talked about how Rare is evaluating our first cross-regional campaign review, while the second post was on how Madagascar is a biological marvel, but it faces grave threats. His third post is about how conservation is all about people.
What did we find?
Our team, which included Dale Galvin, COO, Daniel Hayden, Global Program Operations, and Annalisa Bianchessi, Madagascar Pride Program Manager, and I spent several days with Madagascar Campaign Manager Gildas Andriamalala evaluating progress to date. We met with fishers who were the target of the campaign, community leaders from the target area and neighboring villages, as well as the campaign team itself. We visited the reef, spoke to monitoring experts and traveled by boat and 4WD to the communities that are the focus of the campaign, and saw some of the materials that Gildas has produced. Here are some of the highlights from our findings:
Successes
Level of Engagement by Blue Ventures
We were very pleased to see the level of understanding about the Pride campaign by the leadership of the lead agency partner, BlueVentures. This level of interest is not only key in providing Gildas the support he needs to improve the campaign, but also for ensuring that the Pride campaign fits into Blue Venture’s organizational strategy. Overall, we have found that a high level of engagement by the management team of the partner organization is a leading indicator that the Pride campaign will be a success and have lasting impact.
Knowledge Transfer
One of the goals of every Pride campaign is to develop local capacity, not just within the campaign manager, but also within the local partner. The fact that Shawn Peabody (Project Coordinator) for Blue Ventures has used many of the tools in Pride to help write a management plan is a key sign of this knowledge transfer. In addition, we were thrilled to hear that Shawn is writing an article for MacArthur Foundation on social marketing.
Monitoring Protocols
For a relatively small organization, we found Blue Ventures impressive in their willingness and capacity to monitor biological resources. It is exceptional that an organization can so closely track the life cycle of a conservation target over such a long period.
Gilda’s Professional Growth
Often, a campaign manager returns from Pride training with greater self-confidence and more skills, but the changes may go unnoticed. What was great to see was that Gildas not only feels more confident, but also that Blue Ventures founder and research director, Alasdair Harris, and Shawn both noticed improvements in Gildas’ project management skills, strategic thinking skills and communication skills.
Improvement Areas
Leveraging Volunteers and Keeping the Message Fresh
One of the keys of successful Pride campaigns is to create a social movement and that is keen to support the campaign and be involved. The campaign needs to engage with volunteers, like the local student group, and train local messengers to keep the campaign alive. This is especially important because the campaign is constrained by inadequate transportation (Gildas does not have unlimited funds for travel, and he cannot travel alone) and the logistical challenges of the site. For example, the campaign would benefit from having one person in each key village to act as an emissary for the campaign. The collateral could reach that person through other BV staff or volunteers who could leave Andavadoaka and drop off supplies of fresh materials, and provide news and ideas for distributing materials.
Target Audience Selection
The team from Rare believed that in order for enforcement to be fair and credible, the campaign should do some targeted marketing to beach seiners and poison fishers outside the Velondriake coast. They also need to understand the laws and that “real Vezo” don’t beach seine or poison fish. This outreach could simply entail a conversation with their leaders and a fact sheet. However, to exclude these groups from the campaign might mean a potential loss of support and lead to a turf war.
Barrier Removal Strategy Relies Exclusively on Law Enforcement
A core element of a great Pride campaigns is the community’s sense of pride about where they live and pride in their community. Respect for the Dina (the traditional court in Madagascar) is to show pride in one’s heritage. That said, Dina enforcement also has the potential to create conflict. Therefore, Rare stressed the need for Blue Ventures to assess additional behavior changes that all the coastal communities could adopt. The tactics for encouraging the behavior change might include:
- Training on correct and sustainable fishing techniques
- Community events in which people convert their nets that have very fine netting to bigger netting
- Loan/lease new nets with appropriate netting to fishers so they can try them
- Using the money from the collection of fines to help finance the purchase of new nets for fishers.
The Road Ahead
Blue Ventures took our recommendations in the spirit in which we delivered them and, has since made great progress. Earlier this month Shawn Peabody wrote:
“I have received and reviewed the detailed report that you sent us. We would like to thank you again for your great visit and your feedback on our campaign. We’ve found the visit very helpful in energizing our team and focusing our efforts on a few key areas. I am happy to report that we have hired a new staff member who will be in charge of Dina enforcement capacity building. In other news, Nosy Be just successfully prosecuted a Morombe migrant for trespassing in the sea cucumber area and fined him a full 100,000 Ariary (approximately US$45). The Nosy Be president has come a long way in the last year — before, he rarely reported poison fishing or poaching in the reserve. Now, he led a group of village elders and pirogue owners to enforce one of the largest fines in Velondriake history. We still have a lot of work to do, but things are looking good”.
Pictured above is Nauda Marcilli, a village elder and president of the Northern region of the site. He told us he is committed to helping stop destructive fishing but feels it is hard to enforce laws on people in the neighboring communities.
Gildas’ campaign posters hang in the local coffee shop, also part of Nauda’s home.
Juvenile fish have been collected by Nauda as evidence of the detrimental effects of poison fishing.
Community members listen to Gildas’ Pride campaign song in the village of Bevatu.
A boat sail with Gildas’ campaign message was created by a local artist (second from left), Gildas, and his supervisor Shawn Peabody (on the right).
The campaign boat, first time at sea with the new campaign sail that the campaign created. (Daniel Hayden and Dale are helping carry it to sea)
Campaign manager Gildas Andriamalala, Daniel Raberinary (octopus scientist and key player in the establishment of the Velondriake MPA), Paul Butler and Dale Galvin on what turned out to be somewhat of an epic pirogue journey.
Local pirogues, some sails are truly a patchwork but mostly they are white sails that could easily be painted and be used as “living billboards at sea”.
Reaching Morombe, the biggest town north of the site where the neighboring Saraha people live. Some of the Saraha fishers migrate to the Velondriake MPA every day to fish using illegal methods such as poison fishing and beach seine netting.
Morombe is a larger town as the cargo from some of the vessels demonstrates in the photo above.
Meeting with Dai (left), a school teacher and politician in Morombe who is an advocate and key opinion leader for the Saraha people living in Morombe.
Meeting with the Fisheries Control Agency officer based in Morombe.
A few kilometers out of the village of Andavadoaka is the Spiny Forest with baobab trees shown above.
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