FOUR MONTHS AFTER THE GIANTS CLUB SUMMIT, OUR CONSERVATIONISTS ARE STARTING TO

T DOES not seem like an activity t h a t wo u l d d r aw a c r o wd . Flanked by the unblemished beauty of one of Gabon’s national parks, a fence post is being powered into the ground. Yet a joyous crowd has gathered to cheer each time the hammer strikes to push it deeper.

The reason why tells much about the challenges of conservation, and how the Giants Club, the elephant protection initiative supported by the Evening Standard, has been working with its partners to deliver on the pledges made at its historic inaugural summit in Kenya earlier this year.

This is the first stage of a project being implemented by Gabon’s parks agency, with Giants Club assistance, that will help ensure villagers and their elephant neighbours can live happily beside each other. Once completed, the posts will hold up the country’s first electric fence to stop elephants from damaging villagers’ crops.

One of those applauding at Lopé National Park is Jaqueline Gnagne, the chief of the nearest village. “This will save us from going hungry,” she said. Her village used to be home to more than 100 people but now there are only a few dozen — mostly old women.

With the elephants eating all the crops, most young men have left to try to make a living in the capital, Libreville. But once the two-metre-high electric fence is up, Ms Gnagne hopes they will come back.

A few minutes down the road, signs of the voracity of the animals are ever ywhere. Banana trees have been ripped from the ground and fields of crops flattened. Gabon’s 45,000 ele- phants often wander into villages to eat manioc or banana trees, threatening the locals’ livelihoods and prompting resentment and even retaliatory killings. Locals have tried everything from banging pots to throwing powdered pepper but nothing has worked. In La Lopé, the fence is their only hope.

This matters not only for the villagers but also the elephants’ survival. Poachers, many crossing the border from Cameroon, have killed thousands of Gabon’s elephants for ivory. The Democratic Republic of Congo used to have 500,000 forest elephants but now there are only 3,000.

If in Gabon the crops grow and people can thrive, poachers will have a harder time getting local support for their activities. “We love elephants,” said Esperance Mbamba, one of the Lopé villagers. “We just want to love them at a distance.”

Gabon’s President, Ali Bongo, is a key supporter of the Giants Club and the fence project — which is being funded by his government and managed by the country’s national park’s agency, with Giants Club’s experts providing technical and logistical support. Mr Bongo, who is awaiting the results of this weekend’s presidential election, said: “Here