Empower the Batwa: Support Numidiary Uganda

We owe so much to our friend Justice, who donated land to our conservation project with the dream that this site would support the community and provide a means to teach them how they can do their part in ecological preservation. With this fundraiser, we are continuing the legacy and dream that Justice imparted upon us.

Our guineafowl conservation work has been ongoing since 2020, and as we began to develop our operational site in Western Uganda, our conservation goals began to evolve. The Numidiary Uganda site has now expanded beyond simply supporting a niche of guineafowl conservation, and has branched into a multi-faceted conservation project which incorporates programs that unite a global public, indigenous peoples, keystone ecosystems, and wildlife in a symbiotic web connecting them all. Through ecologically-based conservation initiatives and educational programs, Numidiary Uganda is empowering and preserving the culture of marginalized indigenous peoples- specifically aiming at uplifting the Ugandan Batwa community. With several initiatives being undertaken, our projects are creating food stability, income provisions, native species proliferation, underprivileged education, outreach awareness, and more. The Numidiary Uganda site is slowly growing into a place that will invite guests and tourists to get involved with all the aspects of these conservation initiatives, allowing us to share the problems and their solutions with a wide audience. We have been given the opportunity to purchase a property lot adjacent to the one we are currently developing. The joint site sits just outside Kibale National Park, and it is frequented by wild baboons, elephants, and the very chimps that Jane Goodall has worked with. If we are able to secure donor funding to purchase the adjacent lot, Numidiary Uganda will be able to build a traditional indigenous village on the site, and offer free housing and jobs to members of the Batwa community.

Uganda's original indigenous people are one of the most discriminated ethnic groups in the world, finding themselves only one generation away from total cultural extinction. Passing traditional wisdom between generations through oral accounts, the severe illiteracy levels and broken distribution of the Batwa people have eroded their ability to educate their youth, now facing both destitute poverty and a loss of cultural identity. Four out of ten Batwa children do not reach the age of five, and of those that do, only ten percent receive any schooling whatsoever. With negligible access to healthcare, no political representation, and an average life expectancy of 28 years old, the Batwa people are in dire need of ways to cultivate their own socioeconomic advancement. Scattered throughout makeshift slum settlements in western Uganda, they no longer have access to the sustainable forest provisions which they had depended upon for millennia, and as a result, have fallen behind the rest of Uganda in modern progression. Only fourteen percent of the community members we surveyed were elders who had experienced a forest-dependent lifestyle. When the last of these elders are gone, there will be no way to preserve the ethnic identity and cultural practices of a people who were stewards of the forest since before Africa's written history.

With your help, we are preserving this knowledge and allowing the original stewards of Uganda's wildlife to secure a role for themselves in an ecological preservation project that will save both the indigenous wildlife and the indigenous culture. Your donation directly leads to a home for the homeless, education for the most marginalized people, access to traditional medicine, income for the most destitute. We are not offering a man a fish to feed him for the day. We are teaching a man to fish so that he can be fed for a lifetime. And with your help, we are giving him all the training, opportunity, and equipment to teach his children how to fish, so that an entire generation of this most-in-need ethnic group will no longer sleep on empty stomachs. By joining us, the Batwa who join our programs will be helping themselves and keeping Africa's wild spaces truly wild. We appreciate any support you are willing to give.

-With thanks and gratitude from the Numidiary Uganda team