The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

Capacity Building Of Indigenous Peoples Organisations In The African Great Lake Region

As funded by the Baring Foundation

The indigenous communities of the African Great Lake Region, the Batwa and the Bambuti, have been marginalised since pre-colonial times and furthermore, in the 1970s, during the creation of the region’s national parks, they were evicted from their forest home and prevented from pursuing their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They received no compensation and without alternative livelihoods they have since suffered from abject poverty.

Since 2001 the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund has been working with the African Indigenous and Minority Peoples Organisation (AIMPO) on a practical, local level to improve the communities’ socio-economic conditions. But in order to have a greater impact, there is also a need to have the issues addressed at a national and international level, as it is widely recognised that legislation throughout the region ignores indigenous people’s rights.

The capacity building programme was thus designed to empower the Batwa and Bambuti so that they can assert their civil rights and their land rights. In this way the programme is to contribute towards their long-term poverty relief by facilitating an enhancement of their socio-economic conditions.

The specific objectives of the project are as follows:

· To train and equip the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund’s local field staff so that they can support and monitor the partner organisations more effectively.

· To enhance the capacity of AIMPO so that it can develop as a trans-border organisation representing the indigenous peoples of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.

· For AIMPO to try to effect change at a governmental level through United Nations resolutions by lobbying internationally at the Working Group on Indigenous Populations and the Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues.

· For AIMPO to develop Community Based Organisations (CBOs) from within the Batwa and Bambuti communities so that they have the capacity to assert their rights themselves and implement their own projects.

· To enhance the exchange of ideas and experience between indigenous organisations in the trans-border region to develop further capacity between them.