- Local conservationists across Africa face threats, isolation and underfunding, as illustrated by Nigerian conservationist Itakwu Innocent, who survived an assassination attempt and has endured years of violence and ostracism for protecting wildlife and opposing poaching in his community.
- Women and young scientists in particular face systemic barriers in conservation, including gender bias and limited access to funding and recognition, despite taking leadership roles and driving grassroots initiatives in places like Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria.
- Funding disparities and broken promises by international NGOs have undermined trust in conservation efforts, making it harder for local scientists like Owan Kenneth to gain community support without financial incentives.
- Despite these challenges, recognition and success stories are emerging, with initiatives like fellowships and community-led reforms helping figures such as Adekambi Cole, Bashiru Koroma and Asuquo Nsa Ani make tangible conservation gains and inspire others.
On the evening of May 9, 2019, conservationist and teacher Itakwu Innocent narrowly survived an assassination attempt outside his home in Kubong-Bette, a small farming village in the southeastern Nigerian state of Cross River.
“Daddy! Gun!” Innocent recalls his son screaming seconds before a shot was fired. The bullet scraped his temple, shredding his earlobe into a dangling piece of bleeding flesh.
“They thought I was dead,” Innocent says.
The attempt on Innocent’s life epitomizes the threats facing African scientists who come from, and work on, the frontlines of rural conservation.
Innocent’s intricate connection to the grassroots ecosystem gives him a deep understanding of the land and the people that surround him. Yet, this connection exposes him to attacks and threats that, unlike foreign or urban-based scientists, he lacks resources to confront or escape.
“One cannot run away from his home,“ he says. “This is my only home. And if I don’t save it, who will?”
Beyond lack of security, scientists like Innocent face a wider array of career challenges, says Babafemi Ogunjemite, a professor of wildlife management at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, in southwest Nigeria. They’re largely isolated from the spotlight and underfunded. Representation, mentors and visibility remain low, and gender bias is an additional barrier to women. As a result, Ogunjemite says, “the best of our talents are not attracted to the conservation sector.”
Viewed as a ‘madman’
Innocent’s passion for nature first manifested at 16, when he grew deeply attached to a hornbill that survived his slingshot. Three months later, he was plunged into sorrow over the bird’s death.
His bond with the hornbill — along with his dismay at the arrival of chainsaws in nearby forests, encounters with Western conservation scientists, and the sighting of a leopard near his home — set him on the path to a career in conservation.
For more than a decade, beginning in 2003, Innocent worked at Drill Ranch, a primate refuge and rehabilitation center. In 2004, he began shutting down his family’s century-old firearms business, which he believed was fueling poaching and insecurity by making affordable weapons available to hunters and conflict actors. This decision, says Innocent, enraged his siblings and relatives: They viewed him as a “madman” for prioritizing wild animals over wealth. Ostracized by his family in 2012, Innocent was also stripped of inherited lands, farms and family name.
Innocent traces the attempt on his life years later to this conflict. The man arrested for shooting him — who was chased down and beaten by other villagers — was a Nigerian soldier who was dating Innocent’s sister.
The case against the alleged assassin failed to progress in court, but an investigation into the incident by the village’s traditional authorities resulted in penalties of varying severity for Innocent’s siblings and relatives, ranging from cash fines and crates of beer to a decade of exile.
Outside his household, Innocent continues to divide opinions. He retains much admiration from his former workplace, where he still occasionally donates primate feed. His seasonal campaign against wildfires, which protects farms from flames, endears him to farmers and mentees.
Yet, more than once, Innocent says, hunters have threatened to kill him for uprooting their snares and helping expose their crimes to investigators. When working with the antideforestation patrol team in 2014, a crowd of loggers beat him to a stupor and smashed his fingernails with a concrete block for refusing them passage at a checkpoint.
“They almost killed me that night,” Innocent recalls, lifting his scarred fingers.
An island of chimpanzees
Years ago, Innocent began mulling over building a skill center that would help keep local youths away from the forest by empowering them with globally viable digital skills.
But that vision was tempered by a lack of cash — an obstacle widely reported by other scientists interviewed by Mongabay, including Koroma Bashiru, who lives more than 2,200 kilometers (about 1,400 miles) away in the city of Bo, Sierra Leone.
Born at the peak of the civil war in 1988, Bashiru didn’t enjoy an easy childhood. “We spent most of our time in the bush trying to escape from rebel forces,” Bashiru says. “I felt the trauma of seeing people being killed.”
Peering into the sky during dark nights of studying led to a fascination with the stars and, in turn, to a 2012 university degree in environmental sciences, which became a corridor to a career in conservation. The year of his graduation, Bashiru visited Viata Sewa, an island near Bo that hosts a rich forest and swarms of butterflies and birds. There’s also evidence, Bashiru says, that western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus), Diana monkeys (Cercopithecus diana) and colobus monkeys (Colobus spp.) inhabit the island.
When he first raised the prospect of converting the island to a tourism-conservation hotspot, Bashiru says locals received it warmly. But he lacked funds to carry out a primary survey to prove primates lived on the island, or to compensate displaced locals and lobby lawmakers to gazette the area. The project has still not been realized, though Bashiru retains the dream.
The lack of resources available to local conservationists can stand in sharp contrast to the largesse of international organizations.
Owan Kenneth, now 36, was a child during what’s often described as the “golden age of Cross River conservation.” Previously thought to be extinct in Nigeria, Cross River gorillas (Gorilla gorilla diehli) were found in the wild in the 1980s, triggering an influx of Western scientists and conservationists.
As the son of a local leader, Kenneth witnessed foreign NGOs promising scholarships, schools, hospitals, water boreholes and roads to persuade enclave communities to accept an active role in the conservation of their own ecosystem.
“They overpromised. They made themselves seem like saviors who have come to solve all of the people’s problems in exchange for conserving the forest,” Kenneth says.
Over time, “cash for conservation” became a pattern in the region, keeping out young rural scientists who lacked the funding to match this flamboyance. And, eventually, broken promises dampened local trust in up-and-coming conservationists like Kenneth.
“Our people now believe that any conservation which doesn’t throw money around is not worth giving time or attention,” Kenneth tells Mongabay. “And this mentality is a huge stumbling block. It has to change.”
Over the past few years, he has spent time and resources chipping away at this mindset through campaigns and engagement, a pathway to stimulate local trust and stewardship that’s driven by love for their own ecosystem, not the cash in it.
Obstacles to women’s leadership
In Kenya’s Embobut Forest, 4,500 km (2,800 mi) away from Kenneth’s hometown, 24-year-old Kuto Naomi faces her own struggle as she seeks to help restore Indigenous stewardship of the forest.
State-backed evictors, led by the Kenya Forest Service, have burnt hundreds of Sengwer homes while enforcing a settlement ban on the Sengwer’s ancestral land.
Decades ago, when the evictions began, land rights and conservation issues were largely seen as a man’s affair. But recently, women like Naomi have emerged not just as partners but as leaders in the Sengwer struggle. They see Embobut not just as a forest hosting trunks of trees for men to defend, but as the connecting root to Sengwer ancestry and language, skills and spirituality.
Naomi is part of a 30-strong Sengwer Berur women’s group working to put Indigenous knowledge and practices at the heart of forest conservation. They hold conservation-focused seminars for women, organize tree-planting exercises to replenish degraded ecosystems, and ensure food security by collecting and banking native seeds.
Though communities applaud their work, many men still oppose the full participation of their wives and daughters, viewing it as a distraction from responsibilities at home. And because men, backed by culture and religion, retain significant control in Sengwer society, some women are expected to align their pursuit of science with home duties — or to abandon such endeavors entirely.
“They don’t have full permission from their husbands to do this conservation thing,” Naomi says of some Berur group members.
In nearby Uganda, conservationist Aol Nancy says gender bias against women in conservation is deep-rooted and diverse. “Conservation in African tradition has always been seen as a man’s role,” says Nancy, who works as a gender-inclusive officer at Friends of Zoka, a women-led fund diversifying the income sources of women who rely on and live in forested communities.
There’s also genuine concern about safety and physical toll, Nancy says. Growing risk of rapes, assaults and shootings, as well as the inherent dangers of work in remote and rugged habitats, discourages families from enrolling their daughters on that career path. Nancy nearly gave up her own conservation career when she began receiving death threats from unknown people.
Women are minorities in land and forest ownership in many societies, and this can diminish their influence in its conservation. “The lands belong to men, and the traditional leadership is led by men,” Nancy says. “In a society that says a woman’s place is in the kitchen, how can they lead?” This, she says, has created reluctance and apathy.
Despite these historic fault lines, Nancy says society is gradually beginning to recognize the excellence of women in resource conservation. And in some communities, even deeply patriarchal leaderships are accepting women as key players in conservation science.
However, the work of these new-generation female conservators, she adds, is often undocumented and deprioritized, hiding them from the global spotlight, funding and networking opportunities.
Pathways to recognition
Despite the many obstacles, some young African scientists are receiving global recognition and career opportunities, pointing to a path forward for the field.
Adekambi Cole, a postgraduate student at the University of Calabar in Cross River, has long been fascinated with the state’s eponymous gorilla, the world’s rarest and most elusive great ape, with an estimated 300 individuals in the wild.
In 2023, he was awarded a fellowship from the Cross River Gorilla Initiative, a program led by the Wilder Institute-Calgary Zoo, in partnership with the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, that aims to train and support upcoming leaders in gorilla science.
Cole worked with rangers and ex-hunters to delineate Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary into grid cells. Then, he installed more than a dozen camera traps in spots showing signs of gorilla activity. The work paid off: three times in 2024 his cameras caught footage of giant male silverbacks. The news went viral locally and abroad.
“It was a great breakthrough for me, very fascinating. I felt relevant in the field,” Cole says, recalling the first sighting of the footage. “It feels like a privileged person because it is rare to see young, vibrant Nigerians get the backing in the field.”
In 2012, Bashiru, like Cole, felt this kind of “rare moment” when he was selected for a fellowship run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, with a specific focus on mentoring up and coming ape scientists in Africa.
Today, a handful of programs, including those run by the African Wildlife Foundation and the Society for Conservation Biology, mirror this model. Together with diverse partners, these programs support dozens of rising African conservationists who are finding creative ways to solve environmental issues.
Small victories
While the challenges dominate the headlines, little wins are making small but steadily growing impacts. In Owan Kenneth’s community of Okwa, for example, chemical fishing was causing water pollution and fish scarcity, which was mourned and debated in the local assembly.
In 2010, during his father’s second stint as a community head, Kenneth made a persuasive proposal to ban chemical fishing and schedule seasonal fishing windows for specific rivers. His father was convinced, and a customary decree was issued to back the reforms.
Today, the rivers have recovered their diversity and abundance. “There are now many fish in the rivers everywhere,” Kenneth says. But the biggest win for him is ideological: that forest owners lead conservation, motivated by the love for it, not for money.
And it’s this kind of love that has kept Asuquo Nsa Ani working for the past two decades at Drill Ranch, where he cares for a group of drill monkeys (Mandrillus leucophaeus) with whom he has developed a deep bond. “There are over a dozen drills, and I know their stories,” Nsa-Ani told Mongabay.
“Everything here is about passion for nature,” Nsa-Ani says. “It is not a job for everyone. The pay is not much. Without love and passion and patience, you can’t care for animals.” So, when he won the 2024 Siddle-Marsden Award, which recognizes African nationals doing exceptional work in sanctuaries or wildlife centers, it was a beautiful surprise.
The project’s directors, along with other staff and partners, had secretly nominated him.
“It means a lot to me. I was honored. It was quite wonderful,” says Nsa-Ani, who is soft-spoken and sturdily built. “It boosted my morale. It can also inspire others.”
Sitting on a simple wooden bench, he recalls the glamor of that day when he climbed the stage, flanked by big conservation dignitaries from across Africa and abroad. He recalls the photos and cheers, the celebratory handshakes, the beaming lights, and the elegant hall.
“That was the greatest moment of my life,” he says.
Saving Nigeria’s gorillas was also meant to help communities. It hasn’t (analysis).
Correction: A photo caption was modified to identify the man releasing a monitor lizard alongside Asuquo Nsa Ani as former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, W. Stuart Symington.
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