Engagement key to academic research
The world of academia tends to be closed off to society where the likeminded exercise their intellectual prowess, often out of reach of the ordinary man or woman. Academic conferences are arenas filled with budding scholars and seasoned researchers alike,
AT TIMES this research is pertinent to the general public and communities of different orientations and while they are subjects and objects of the study, they can oft-times find themselves outside the space where findings are made and deliberations take place.
This was a situation that the Regional Platform - Production and Conservation in Partnership (RP-PCP) sought to change when they held their 2nd Regional Conference themed “Co-existing (with) in TFCA, local perspectives” in Chiredzi last month.
The RP-PCP, which was established in 2007, and has over the past 10 years been working with the University of Zimbabwe, National University of Science and Technology, Bindura University, Chinhoyi University, Lupane University and the University of Zambia as well as two French research organisations Cirad and CNRS in applied research on Trans-Frontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs).
The conference brought together academics from local and foreign universities as well as research organisations operating in Zimbabwe.
In addition to the academics, the conference welcomed community leaders and people from the areas that many of the researchers work in.
RP-PCP coordinator Dr Michel de Garine-Wichatitsky said since the inception of the platform they have been targeting specific contribution of applied research for the benefit of local communities.
“Our research is done not only for the benefit of the people but with and by the local communities.
“We address all the issues that link protected areas and their periphery and we are very interdisciplinary in that everything that is relevant for these interfaces between the protected areas and the periphery can be an object of research under the platform,” he said.
According to Dr Garine-Wichatitsky in 2013, the researchers working under the RP-PCP, were awarded a grant for a programme called RenCaRe.
“With RenCaRe, we started from grassroots levels by engaging the communities and asking them the main opportunities or the main constraints they saw in the fact that they lived close to a protected area.
“Based on this they drew up six priorities that they thought were important and they wanted us as researchers to address.
“From this information, we issued a call for proposals and we recruited 12 students, eight in Zimbabwe and four from other Sadc countries who worked specifically on some of these issues.
“That was the first step of making sure that what we do is really grounded into the real life of the local communities of Hwange and the South East Lowveld where we conducted some of our research,” he said.
The conference in Chiredzi was also a culmination of the RenCaRe project where the academics presented some of their findings on the various research they had been doing.
The conference was split into six sessions based on the themes – Access to Natural Resources, Mitigation of Human-Wildlife Conflicts, Improving Livestock and Crop Productions by Local Farmers, Boundaries of Protected Areas, Prevention and Control of Livestock/Wildlife/Human Diseases and Sharing Benefits Generated by Wildlife - that the communities had drawn up.
Each session was co-chaired by a leading academic and an individual from one of the local communities such as Malipati, on the southern border of Gonarezhou National Park where the researchers worked.
Mr Albert Chauke, a local headman from Malipati was one of the co-chairs at the conference.
He was appreciative of the work that the researchers did and the conference as it assisted the lives of the people in the communities and gave them insight into how other communities were living.
“One of the major problems that we face in our community is that of human-wildlife conflict. We have had many incidents where we lose our crops to elephants or some of our animals are eaten by lions and jackals.
“The researchers have been working with us to find solutions to our problems.
“Through some of their initiatives they have assisted us to engage the park officials and though there are no policy commitments yet, this has been good for them to see the way we are suffering,” he said.
According to Mr Chauke, through the researchers they have been working with, the community has also changed their farming lifestyle for the better.
“From working with the researchers we learnt that there are alternative ways for us to rear animals and plant our crops. There is space for planting and space for our animals to graze.
“The clear separation of grazing land and ploughing land is a good thing and I am quite grateful for this,” he said.
From the conference specifically, Mr Chauke was appreciative of the fact that he was able to interact with different communities.
He had never in his life been to such a platform and despite the academic language of some of the presentations he still managed to learn quite a lot.
“It was a great benefit to interact with other communities from different parts of Zimbabwe and other countries to learn from them how they do things.
“Some of the people are in a similar situation to us with regards to human-wildlife conflict and others are finding great ways of dealing with these problems.
“They had illustrations and models of some of the methods that could work and I think it was good to see as we can try and implement them in our own community,” he said.
RP-PCP Secretary Coordinator Dr Prisca Mugabe said the RP-PCP came together to generate knowledge which will contribute to sustainable development, biodiversity conservation and improved rural livelihoods in Southern Africa through strengthening national research capacities, multidisciplinary approaches and institutional partnerships with a focus on protected areas and neighbouring production.
“Wildlife are a resource, they are a natural biodiversity, they offer a lot of natural goods and services but they can be a problem in the co-existence. Sometimes you have competition for foliage in the grazing area, competition for water and they can even be carriers for diseases.
“So the focus for our research platform is to say how we deal with these interactions. With the ultimate purpose of making sure that we promote the well-being of human beings,” she said.
According to Dr Mugabe, it is important that their research directly involves communities as they are best able to articulate their challenges and decide which solutions would work best.
“If you look at how research was being done maybe let’s say 30 or 40 years ago, we didn’t interact so much with local communities, the tools were there but we were not very much into really engaging with communities.
“But now we are getting better and better. What we have learnt in the academic arena is that research has to be about addressing problems and coming up with solutions. You can do it from your office and from books, but that will not change the lives of communities,
“Only through interacting with a community are you able to understand what kind of people are they, what resources are they dealing with, what resources matter to them.
“You are trying to get them to say so what is important, where do they have challenges, so that when you do research it must be about innovation,” she said.
This approach at research has proved beneficial not only to the communities which are able to be directly involved in seeking solutions for their challenges but also for the students who interact with these communities and conduct the research.
“The way we do the research is that we are also building the capacity of the next generation of researchers. We work with different local universities and foreign research institutions.
“We help the students through the process of learning how to be researchers, how to interact with communities and to understand the needs of the communities and come up with solutions together with the communities.
“The training that we offer and as a platform is exceptional and we are very rich platform because if you put together all the academics from all those universities, plus the French partners that we work with Cirad and CNRS we have a lot of expertise,” Dr Mugabe said.
Speaking during the final session of the conference in Chiredzi, renowned academic Professor Marshall Murphree acknowledged the need for a better means of interacting between communities affected by wildlife and those that work to preserve it.
“Those who like to consider themselves environmentalists or conservationists, by all means remain so but recognise that the conditions under which you work have changed.
“They have changed here in Zimbabwe and it will be to our great credit if someday, somebody could look back in retrospect and recognise that we were able to come through with things that broke up that socially induced state.
“That the mutually exclusive existence that we can now find between partners out there on the land will be broken up because we found more in common than we find in being apart,” he said.
Such conferences and further interactions between academics and communities are the first step to ending such mutually exclusive relationships.