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I came to Uganda to join a special trip organized by The Small Giants Academy from Australia, one of the Family Offices focused on impact and system change that I admire and draw inspiration from for my work at Meraki Impact. The invitation was an immediate “Hell Yes” for me—an opportunity to dive deep for twelve days into the complexity of wildlife preservation and its intersection with poverty and human development. Our main case study would be the Jane Goodall Institute. Dr. Jane Goodall discovered long ago that her efforts to save chimpanzees—the apes that share 98.7% of human DNA—from extinction would only be possible if she addressed the social issues linked to poverty affecting the communities near their natural habitats. Fast forward a few decades, and her impactful work has resulted in initiatives like the Roots and Shoots youth movement, which empowers young people to change the world in their own way.
We began our journey in Entebbe, where Uganda's most important airport is situated by the gigantic Lake Victoria, which for centuries has supported surrounding communities with water and fresh fish. So much so that a chaotic urban metropolis, Kampala, has grown close to its shores. Among the many islands of Lake Victoria, home to fishing communities, is the Ngamba Island Chimpanzees Sanctuary, home for over 50 chimpanzees rescued by JGI and partner organizations from poachers who still hunt these animals for the pet and bushmeat black market. The traumatized chimpanzees that are lucky enough to be rescued arrive at the island traumatized from witnessing their families' murders and from the mistreatment and torture at the hands of smugglers.
There, we met Amos, the passionate keeper of the sanctuary who knows each of the chimpanzee residents of the island by name. We soon found out why. Every day at 11 a.m., the chimpanzees come out of the forest that occupies most of the island to receive an extra ration of fresh fruits by the shelters built in the sanctuary to help them recover and ease their transition into that special chimpanzee community of survivors. The group still operates as they do in the wild, under a complex web of social relations involving an alpha male as the main leader, his senior commanders down the ranks, and the lower-ranking chimpanzees who are the last allowed to feed in the group and try to make themselves as invisible as possible to avoid bullying. Amos gave us a summary of the power struggles within the group and the different leaders who came to power and later lost their positions, often dethroned by female rebellions that decided their leadership was no longer benefiting the group. He explained that the leaders who managed to stay in power longer were those wise enough to balance their leadership style with a moderate amount of force and a moderate amount of collaborative behavior. He also talked about how chimpanzee politics works, with males posing as nice candidates, only to become completely mad dictators after winning the alpha male position, often lasting just a few weeks before a new chimp rebellion begins. It all sounded too familiar.
At 11 a.m. sharp, the group was waiting for us. They know that tourists on the island mean an extra ration of food, as feeding them is one experience tourists can have to financially support the sanctuary. Being face to face with our cousins for the first time was an intense experience. They are not only smart as expected but also exhibit behavior strikingly familiar to ours. An old male caught my attention with how he frantically signaled to us that he wanted food and how he expressed his frustration like a grumpy old man when we clumsily threw fruits and missed his hands. Adopting a chimpanzee from the sanctuary is a way to support it, so I had to adopt Mr. Grumpy.
We often overlook this, but like with other iconic African species, humans are responsible for a chimpanzee genocide in Africa, reducing their population from an estimated 2 million to an average of 200,000 over the last 50 years. Thanks to the work of organizations like JGI, the numbers are rising in protected areas, but the struggle to protect the species and their natural habitat continues.
We would encounter our cousins again in the wild on this trip and learn more about the complexity of preserving their habitat. The key strategy of the Jane Goodall Institute, which is producing encouraging results, is based on coexistence. How can we harmonize the interests and livelihoods of communities and wild animals through education and by addressing the needs of both humans and animals? We met one of the key leaders in the organization, Dr. Peter, who gave us a lesson in systemic thinking at the botanical gardens of Entebbe, where the last remaining massive native trees still have a sanctuary to thrive amidst the explosion of human activity. Dr. Peter had a similar story to those we met at the sanctuary: a deep love for his work with the chimpanzees and a clear purpose in serving these beautiful animals. Addressing the needs of the community is not a trivial task, he said. For example, we quickly identified that water scarcity was fueling human-wildlife conflict. Women and children in the communities were tasked with fetching water, and as water became more scarce, they had to walk farther into chimpanzee habitats, often leading to violent encounters with chimpanzee groups. The obvious solution was to lobby the government to provide public water infrastructure to villages close to wildlife sanctuaries. However, resistance arose—not from the men, but from the same women who had to walk miles and carry heavy buckets of water on their heads. Deeper research with interviews revealed that providing direct water to the village would prevent women from the only free social interaction they had, bonding and socializing away from the control of men as they went to fetch water. This was just one example of the web of complex social and cultural relations putting pressure on wild habitats.
I thought about how often, in the impact space, we jump to conclusions with our limited tunnel vision, blinded by our own biases, putting our money behind initiatives we label as impactful or working to prevent others we label as destructive or generators of negative impact. As we later experienced in another remarkable project trying to bring back a species from extinction—the rhinos—the Ziwa Project created a sanctuary for rhinos in the north of Uganda, aiming to reintroduce rhinos, which had been completely decimated in Uganda in the 1970s, back into its national parks. The project began in the mid-90s with three couples rescued from the U.S. and imported from Kenya. The sanctuary now hosts 44 individuals, already in the third generation, with the first rhino born again in Uganda after 26 years since the last one was poached. Brooke, the leader of Raw Africa, our host on this trip and a veteran in rhino conservation, pointed out how important it is to have tourists visiting the country to see these animals in the wild. It is a fact that, without the millions of dollars generated by the safari industry, we would likely no longer be able to see these iconic animals in the wild. The only thing preventing poachers from wiping out the remaining animals is the tourist dollars that fund conservation, turning wildlife observation into a crucial impactful business.
Dr. Peter has calculated an estimated $20 million in chimpanzee-related tourism in Uganda alone, and the government is now aligning interests to protect the major apes of Uganda and ensure that the Big Five are also back and thriving in their national parks to attract more safari dollars. It dawned on me how simplistic thinking can lead us to do completely the wrong things in terms of impact. I recalled my many European friends who made the tough decision to stop flying to cut down their carbon emissions and who firmly believe we should all do the same. Look a bit deeper, though, and one can see that without tourists flying to the few remaining forests, the habitat for wildlife would be quickly turned into firewood, accelerating our climate collapse.
In the meantime, as we visited one of the Roots and Shoots groups in Hoima, an area plagued by deforestation accelerated by the sugar industry, we watched as the girls and boys in the group talked about making their own reusable tampons to keep girls in school. An impact investor would quickly label this initiative as SDG 5—promoting gender equality—definitely not something connected to SDG 15, Life on Land, for those interested in forest conservation. Think again. Giving girls the means to stay in school during their monthly cycle increases their chance of not falling behind and dropping out, which in turn reduces the number of women and families falling into the poverty trap that leaves them with little alternative but to make a living by cutting down firewood or whatever else they can find in nearby forests.
The whole idea of picking your favorite SDG and focusing on solving that goal while ignoring the rest is naïve and impossible within the web of nature's complexity and our polycrisis.
In Hoima, we had one of the most inspiring and shocking visits of the trip. We met Jovan, a volunteer with JGI who monitors a family of 60 chimpanzees living in the last standing forest corridor in the region, a 100-meter by two-kilometer forest strip surrounded by sugarcane fields. The area was almost completely devastated decades ago by the sugarcane industry. When JGI arrived at the site, chimpanzees were being hunted for destroying plantations and raiding community gardens for food. Jovan, a member of the community, is responsible for the ongoing program of education and mediation that promotes coexistence between chimpanzees, local communities, and the sugar plantation. Now, this family of chimpanzees is rising in numbers again, coming out of the forest peacefully to feed on an extra ration of sugarcane provided by the plantation every morning. We might end up with diabetic chimpanzees, but a balance has been reached, and their sanctuary is protected. I asked Jovan why he does the hard work of monitoring the chimpanzees three times a week and managing the complex stakeholder relations as a volunteer. He said it was his life’s work, and his eyes shone with love as he talked about the different chimps in that family. He explained that it’s not easy to have only two days to work his land and provide for his family, but working with the chimpanzees gives him a sense of purpose.
Once again, I was blown away by human generosity and the power of service I encountered in the poorest communities I visited on my journey to understand the power of regeneration. Looking at these Ugandan villages—quickly labeled as poor by Western eyes like mine—if you look deeper, you find a wealth of love, community, and purpose. That’s what we found in the Women’s Boomu Initiative, neighboring Queen Elizabeth National Park. In this community, Edna, another hero of service and purpose, created a group of women using weaving and community tourism as tools for income generation and resilience. Walking through their community, you feel the sense of belonging and the net of support they’ve built, reflected also in the subsistence farming widely practiced across Uganda. It’s a complex system that combines different species in small plots of land, producing the healthy diet of Ugandan communities. Yes, there is financial scarcity and poverty, but walking through the village, we met a widow in her late 60s who led a family of 32 children of all ages. I can only imagine the task of feeding so many children, but Edna and the community have her back. Us “Mzungus”—the local word for generic white gringos—are invited into the community to learn how they live, grow food, cook, and participate in workshops with the women. It’s about sharing and valuing what they have to teach us. Making tourism a tool of positive impact requires systemic thinking. It involves breaking away from the usual roles of the white colonizer, there to exploit, or the white savior, there to do good and give away money to the kids. It’s a cultural exchange between human beings sharing love, connection, and learning from each other.
We left behind the dusty sugar plantations of Hoima and entered thriving smallholder subsistence farming grounds. While I was digesting my thoughts on the human insanity of turning pristine, rich forests into sugarcane fields, only to later turn them into sugar—the cause of obesity, diabetes, and suffering in the rich world—I stumbled upon one of the many spam emails I get as an impact investor. This one caught my attention because it had Uganda in the headline. It was an opportunity to invest in a company called Muhazi Heritage, raising close to $25 million USD for the acquisition of 10,000 acres of land in that same region for the establishment of a new sugar plant, aiming to be the leading producer of organic sugar in the region with the highest standards of sustainability. The investment was labeled an impact investment, not only for organic production under so-called sustainable practices but also for generating 800 jobs, growing to 2,000 with the expansion of the project, and engaging 1,000 smallholder farmers. That "engagement" likely meant persuading these smallholder farmers to give up their already regenerative systems of mixed crops and symbiotic complexity—systems that give their communities food security and resilience—to embrace monoculture sugarcane farming.
Our old colonial biased mindsets still believe that all Africans need are jobs—not the ones they currently have as subsistence farmers and community members, but miserable jobs with zero autonomy, chopping down sugarcane under the blazing sun. Knowing well how large-scale sugarcane plantations work in other parts of the world, it’s easy to see that it's only a matter of time until cheap African labor is replaced by heavy machinery, making sugarcane production more efficient and profitable. The workers, engaged in the heavy labor of harvesting sugarcane, will be laid off and will likely have to try their luck in Africa's crowded cities as massive agribusiness takes over their land. Then, real poverty begins.
The reality I’ve seen in this immersion in Africa is that we don’t need to get smallholder farmers to make the transition to regenerative agriculture. We need to find a way to prevent them from falling into the poverty trap of monoculture, lured by offtake agreements with big industrial agriculture—just as most of Ivory Coast and Ghana fell into cacao monoculture and now face climate collapse. We need to invest in companies that are willing to acquire a variety of products produced by the complex systems that already exist in Africa. We need to create supply chains that embrace this complexity, support resilience, and enhance food security.
On wildlife conservation, we need community-led tourism. We need enough nature lovers flying to Africa to see the beauty of wildlife in the natural habitat where our ancestors were born. Africa can help us reconnect with nature as we embrace its cultural and human diversity to coexist with the natural world. We need to keep industrial agriculture, which has already wreaked havoc in the rest of the world, from ravaging what’s left of Africa. Uganda, as the Pearl of Africa, has something to teach us.
Come down and see for yourself.
For a real deep dive in Africa join the next Impact Safari to Uganda with Small Giants or contact Raw Africa who runs community travels to 13 countries in Africa
https://www.smallgiants.com.au/impact-safaris
https://rawafricaecotours.com/
Support the work of the Jane Goodall Institute on the link below
https://secure.janegoodall.org/give/328356/#!/donation/checkout
