Capacity Building

By Nouhou Ndam   West Africa’s forests are rapidly disappearing, with only 10% left to shelter both wildlife and humans alike in what had been a massive forest complex stretching from Guinea to Cameroon and covering 680,000 square kilometers (km2). To halt and reverse the deforestation threatening the remaining forest cover (70,000 km2), including the…

By Chaz Kyser   As a company founded to create prosperity for African women, Ghana-based Global Mamas has striven to ensure that both the women it employs and those it partners with to make and sell its array of handcrafted products are treated equitably and positioned for success. However, there is always more to learn…

By Chidera Okeke, Global Mamas Community Outreach Specialist.   For the past 17 years, Global Mamas has progressed in its mission to create a life of prosperity for women across Ghana by creating and selling handmade fair trade products. The upsurge of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a derailment in the organization’s activities and threatened to…

Those committed to combating the illegal trade of animal and plant life across West Africa, or interested in learning how they can become more engaged, now have a new tool at their disposal. A compendium of research by 26 West African researchers on issues related to the effective implementation of the Convention on the International…

By Fatmata Katta   For those charged with helping their countries both adapt to and combat climate change, understanding and being able to leverage climate information is critical. This is particularly true for Sierra Leone, recognized as the third most vulnerable country in the world to the effects of climate change. Thus, WA BiCC and…

By Chaz Kyser, WA BICC Communications Manager   The West Africa Biodiversity and Climate Change Program (WA BiCC) organized a vibrant exchange on “Knowledge Products and Lessons from CITES Master’s Training and Research in West and Central Africa,” held in Accra Jan. 23–24. Not only did the gathering succeed in bringing WA BiCC-supported CITES MSc…

By Jacob Tweh, Wild Chimpanzee Foundation Many might have said that 16-year-old Linda Nyanway’s future looked bleak as she took her now-husband’s hand in marriage. Linda’s parents divorced when she was just three, leaving her to spend most of her childhood with her grandmother in River Gee County, Liberia. Her grandmother worked as a subsistence…

This fall the Global Mamas team, in collaboration with USAID and the West Africa Biodiversity and Climate Change (WA BiCC), is embarking on an exciting new endeavor combining two goals that are an inherent part of our mission: creating sustainable livelihoods in communities with limited economic opportunity while at the same time acting as environmentally…

In collaboration with the Ministry of Water and Forestry of Côte d’Ivoire, WA BiCC organized a training workshop for French-speaking ECOWAS member states from the 21st to the 25th of October on the application of CITES by judges and prosecutors. The goal of the workshop was to strengthen their capacity to support the CITES Management…

Mercy Koomson, a Wildlife Manager at the Kotoka International Airport, is a woman on a mission. She is a graduate of the University of Andalucía with a Master’s degree course in ‘Management and Conservation of Species in Trade’, which was sponsored by the West African Biodiversity and Climate Change Program (WA BiCC). Less than a…