Imagine, if you will, you are going to work. Except you don’t have a normal job and you’re not standing on train platform or sitting in traffic. Instead, you are wading through chest high grass in the Serengeti armed with a spear, wire traps, and poison. It’s a beautiful day in the grassland, but as you look for your prey say a gazelle, all you can think of is that you, too, are prey. For nestled in this grassland are any number of prides of lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas, and other predators.
“No one ever grows up wanting to become a poacher, but this is what many are forced to be to survive. ”
Grumeti Fund, a charity in Tanzania off the Serengeti, understands this well. This past summer, I was hired by Grumeti Fund to shoot a series of community enterprise subjects for them.
As background, Grumeti Reserve is 350,000 acres west of the Serengeti National Park. In essence it sits as a buffer zone between the Serengeti and the villages outside the Serengeti.
It was created as a buffer between the population and the wildlife of the Serengeti. Grumeti’s efforts in ani-poaching are legendary and they use the latest technology and patrol-based tactics to combat poaching.
“But consider this, last year 90,000 wildebeests were poached in the Serengeti. Some of this are huge poaching consortiums that operate out of Kenya, but a lot of it are individuals simply wanting to put food on their family’s table. ”
Why? I believe it starts with education. In Tanzania, outside the Serengeti, many people grow up speaking a tribal language. Then when they go to grade school, they must learn Swahili, which all of the classes are taught in. Around the sixth grade, they begin spending one hour a day learning English. This is taught by a teacher who generally isn’t fluent in English. When they get to high school, everything is taught in English. Imagine growing up speaking a tribal language, then learning Swahili and then learning and being taught in English. All by the time you are 13 or 14 years old.
“Coupled with that, most schools experience huge overcrowding. It isn’t unusual for a classroom to have 100 students. Because educational materials are scarce, there might be only 10 desks and 10 textbooks. Students will sometimes bring rocks into the classroom to sit on. At night, they can’t study because they have no light (many villages are still without electricity). So the drop out rate is huge.
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Without an education, the opportunities for jobs are scarce. We would drive through villages with twenty or thirty men just sitting around chatting. So with no other way to put food on the table, men and, yes, women, turn to poaching to put food on the table.
Grumeti Fund recognized the plight many poachers face. And decided to start an Enterprise Training Program for the villagers. This course teaches them how to start an entrepreneurial business. The goal isn’t to steer them into a particular business, but to set them up for success with skills and understanding what it takes to be successful.
Grace is an ex-poacher who because of the Grumeti Fund’s Enterprise Program is now a successful seamstress.
Grace was an ex-poacher who poached, as she says, merely to survive and put food on her family’s table. Dropping out is particularly hard for women in Tanzania who face many cultural challenges including early pregnancy and FGM, female gender mutilation. Thanks to the Enterprise Program Grace became a successful seamstress. She now has a small shop that she operates on her own. Not only did she stop poaching, she now has a successful dress making business that has empowered her and unleashed a creative side. As Grace says, “When I make a dress that my client likes, it makes me unbelievably happy.” You can see her video at https://vimeo.com/367809076.
Another product of the Grumeti Fund Enterprise Program is Pius. Pius is an ex-poacher who, too, poached to survive and put food on the table for his growing family.
Pius spoke of what it was like to be a poacher. As he described it, it was a life of terror. The famed Serengeti high grass hides every sort of predator. As we were shooting a scene in the Serengeti of Pius walking through the grass with his old poaching weapons, he became visibly nervous and made sure we never got too far from the truck. During his time poaching, Pius had many incidents, stepping on a crocodile once as we attempted to cross a river, being chased by a leopard, and once fighting off a lion with a knife. Years later, Pius suffered, if you will, poaching PTSD with constant nightmares of his previous poaching life.
With the Grumeti Fund’s Enterprise Program, Pius is now a successful beekeeper and shopkeeper. He proudly shows us his house and shows up for his interview in a suit he is obviously proud of .
Because of his business successful Pius, can now send his kids to private schools which have much smaller classroom sizes and has been able to afford a very nice house. He clearly takes pride in the spread he provides us over lunch.
You can see Pius’s video at https://vimeo.com/358187458.
I thought Benson, an elephant monitoring technician, who know works at Grumeti summarized it simply. “I have never met a poacher who was educated.” If he met a young poacher in his village, he says, he would advise them to get some kind of scholarship, or do everything they could do to finish secondary school.
Rob Feakins is a documentary filmmaker and founder of For All Humankind which specializes in shooting films for non-profits and environmental causes. You can see work and client recommendations at forallhumankind.com