I arrived in Benin, a country located next to Nigeria in the area of West Africa, through the GLEN program. In January 2017 I submitted an application, followed by a selection process in Prague and high-quality preparatory seminars with international colleagues in France and Germany. At CREDI-ONG, I then spent 4 months, full of unforgettable experiences and important lessons.

CREDI-ONG is located in the village of Zinvié in southern Benin. It has about 25 paid employees and every year welcomes hundreds of interns from Beninese universities, who come here to learn good practices of fish farming, crop cultivation, animal breeding, ecotourism, and environmental protection.

Self-help savings group

Unsustainable overexploitation of natural resources due to poverty

Environmental protection is truly necessary here. The original landscape of giant trees and wetlands has given way to plantations of banana trees, pineapples, and raphia palms, from whose nuts red oil is produced. As a result, and also due to excessive hunting, some animal species have almost disappeared from the local nature, such as the water antelope sitatunga or the dwarf crocodile.

That is why CREDI-ONG initiated the creation of the Community Nature Park of the Sitatunga Valley. Simply put, it is a project to protect the local biodiversity-rich nature through poverty reduction and territorial development. The organization realized that it is precisely poverty that largely lies behind the unsustainable overexploitation of natural resources. Bans alone cannot help: a person without enough means will still, despite a ban, cut down trees for fuel or hunt antelopes for food. The organization’s goal is therefore to help people develop environmentally friendly activities through which they can earn enough to live with dignity, while simultaneously educating people about the importance of environmental protection.

Does it really work? I would say successes are appearing slowly, but certainly. Thanks to educational activities and the organization’s support, many local farmers have refused to use chemical fertilizers and now farm organically. Others decided to reforest their land. They will therefore have income from timber sales, and the original fauna will return to the grown forest.

I come to the project together with Ida, my colleague from Germany. In the organization, we collaborate with local interns. We do not know the local context, and without them, we would not manage. Our main task is to create an interactive exhibition about the Sitatunga Valley for visitors to the organization. “Above all, make it attractive for both children and adults,” we are instructed.

In addition, we take care of the rescue station. People bring here injured animals that have been found, and after recovery they are released back into nature. “What is in that bucket?”, I ask. “Four small crocodiles. One man brought them here; he found them in a puddle—there, where a new road is being built,” the intern Rinos tells me.

From time to time, observation in nature is carried out. At dawn we set out to the field equipped with binoculars and a notebook to count bird populations in the Valley. A notable species, for example, is the yellow weaver, which builds spherical hanging nests in branches. Inventorying local flora and fauna is not yet complete. A new species is often found, about which it was not previously known that it lives here.

Meetings with local residents

During a field excursion we also go to the Sô River. Our task is to record the animals that live beneath its surface. A few kilometers from the river’s course, the driver says, “From here we cannot continue, we are getting out.” We therefore take off our shoes and wade through what only a few weeks ago had still been a road. To explain: the plain around the Sô river, mainly formed by wetlands and many river branches, undergoes periodic floods linked to the rainy season in the north of the country. From August, water rises, reaching its peak in October when the whole wide plain is underwater. Even local architecture is adapted to flooding—for example, houses here are built on stilts.

On a visit to the village of Lokpo, we participate in an organization meeting with local residents. Our task is to speak with hunters and gather information from them for our interactive exhibition. I am pleasantly surprised by the interviews. Nounaignon James explains how the hunters in the village collectively decided to stop hunting for a few years. “Now, we can again see species in nature that had disappeared here before,” he says, mentioning antelopes, chameleons, monitor lizards, and otters. Hunting today is subject to strict planning by the hunters themselves, so that natural richness remains preserved for future generations as well. Houssouacha Noël speaks in the same spirit. He has never returned to hunting; instead, he started crop cultivation. Sustainably and organically.

Observing women’s self-help group activities

Another field excursion took me to the village of Anagbo, where I encountered self-help groups. These are savings clubs made up exclusively of women. For one year, they save a set amount into a fund every week, and from the resulting fund they can borrow money if needed. The initiative interested me, and I wanted to learn more about it. Likewise, CREDI-ONG needed to gather certain data on the groups and supported my idea to conduct a study. Equipped with two translators, I set out to the field to visit eight self-help groups. In this way I collected data for my thesis, and the organization obtained the information on the groups that it needed.

The women in Anagbo village mainly make their living through producing cassava flour gari and red oil from raphia palm. The savings group provides them with loans, which they use to buy cassava, raphia nuts, and to pay labor costs during production. Additional income from these activities is mainly used to pay school fees for children, for healthcare, and to expand their business. “Now that this group exists, we are more at ease,” one of the women confides to me. “We can do our activities, and when someone is sick or we need to pay school fees, we can find the money.” In interviews, many women also mention that they now feel more independent and more recognized within the family.

I brought home unforgettable experiences, important learnings, and data for my thesis from Benin. I would like to recommend the GLEN volunteer program (http://glen-europe.org – for young people up to 30 years old), which prepared me before the trip itself and helped me reflect at the final seminar in Hungary on what I had experienced.

Text: Tereza Suchánková MRS student at the Department of Development and Environmental Studies PřF UP v Olomouci Foto: Tereza Suchánková a CREDI-ONG http://www.credi-ong.org