Historic Projects
2025
Awareness raising for the Västra Bjäre parish, Sweden.
Caka shared her experiences from the 2024 fieldwork of the BiotaCHFs project "From classroom to community: Engaging Nigerian children in vulture conservation and combating traditional beliefs." She raised awareness about the plight of vultures, the reasons behind their decline, and potential solutions In addition, she discussed her work with the Yellow-billed Kite from her MSc thesis.
2024
Nature Conservation Outreach to Higher Institutions
The Critical Role of Vultures in Public and Environmental Health
At Biota Conservation Hub Foundation, we remain committed to promoting awareness about the important contributions of nature and wildlife to our lives. Recently, we had the privilege of visiting the College of Nursing and Midwifery, Jos Campus, to engage with the health community about the indispensable role vultures play in maintaining public and environmental health.
Vultures are often misunderstood creatures, but their importance cannot be overstated. These remarkable birds act as nature's unpaid sanitation vanguards and decomposers, ensuring our environment stays clean and free of disease. By consuming animal carcasses and preventing their decay in open spaces, vultures curb the spread of harmful viral and bacterial-based pathogens that can cause diseases such as anthrax, botulism, cholera, and foot-and-mouth disease. Their stomachs have corrosive acids that kill the pathogens, making our environment clean and free from such diseases.
Their presence contributes significantly to disease control, making vultures very important to public health. The more vultures we have in our ecosystems, the cleaner and safer our environment becomes. Sadly, vulture populations are rapidly declining worldwide due to factors such as poisoning, habitat loss, and poaching, leaving a gap in this essential natural service. In Nigeria, traditional beliefs are at the fore in the causes of vulture decline and local extirpations.
It was heartening to see how warmly the nursing and midwifery students' community received our message. The engagement highlighted the connection between a healthy vulture population and improved public health outcomes. Together, we can advocate for the protection of these unsung heroes of nature, fostering a cleaner and healthier environment for all.
Let us continue to champion nature conservation and amplify the voices calling for vulture protection. A world with vultures is a healthier world for everyone!
2023
The Girl Child Education Project
According to UNICEF, 13.5 million children in Nigeria do not have access to free and quality basic education. A majority of this number constitute girls in northern Nigeria. For the girls that are fortunate to be enrolled in schools, an estimated 1.3 million of them drop out of school each year before reaching the last year of lower secondary school (aka Junior secondary school 3). Of the girls that drop out of school are 69% from northern Nigeria, and the major driving forces include insecurity, armed banditry, kidnapping, sex trafficking, and early marriage. The age-long traditional belief that the education of a girl child ends in the kitchen and that the boy child is more dominant than the girl child further creates a gender-based educational inequality. This problem is particularly common in rural areas.
To achieve sustainable development goal 5 (gender equality), Michael Manja Williams of the BiotaCHF and our humanitarian team are working to improve the accessibility and quality of education for girls in rural areas of northern Nigeria. Mike is a science teacher himself and has been in academia for nearly two decades. Michael Williams Manja and the team are adopting several strategies to provide solutions to these problems. The strategies include:
-Sourcing grant (majorly a global teacher award small grant awarded by the International Research and Exchanges awarded by the USA embassy to Michael Williams Manja) and donations to build schools and class blocks in rural communities.
- Mobilization and orientation of teachers in rural communities.
- Volunteering to teach in rural communities.
- Sourcing and donations of books to support learning in rural schools.
- Establishment of educational advancement centers across rural communities where students are provided with internet- enabled computers to facilitate easy and efficient learning.
- Organization of cultural re-orientation programs across the communities.
NB: Details of the work can be found here: https://youtu.be/CpTc39dNv70
2020
"Green Schools and surrounding communities" Project: A Conservation Initiative Supported by Rufford Foundation grant
Desertification is a serious environmental hazard that is wreaking havoc in many parts of Sudan and the Sahel Savannah regions of northern Nigeria. In an effort to reduce the continuing environmental catastrophe, we embarked on the "Green School" project where we engaged school students and teachers to plant trees on their school compounds and in surrounding communities.
We acquired and distributed seedlings to schools, village heads, youth leaders and women leaders. To ensure continuity, we trained students on raising tree seedlings so that their schools can then distribute to other places. This project was very successful and continued to expand to other schools and communities most affected by desertification. We are most grateful to the school principals and community leaders who keyed into the project. We are also thankful to the grant donors- The Rufford Foundation for sponsoring the project.
2020
"School Conservation Clubs" Project: A Conservation Initiative Supported by Rufford Foundation grant
School environmental clubs play an important role in imparting knowledge, skills and attitudes required to foster sustainable development and thinking among young people. To champion this course, we embarked on the creation of an environmental club across secondary schools in Bauchi State, North-east, Nigeria.
We designed environmental activities (bird watching being a major activity) that students partake in. We trained school-based teachers who monitor the weekly activities of the clubs. This project was funded by the Rufford Foundation.
2019 / 2020
Conservation talks with Hunters' group
Overhunting is a major problem to wildlife conservation in Nigeria. Poverty has made it even more difficult to combat because it has become a means of livelihood in rural communities, which coincidentally harbour many species of concern. Members of the Biota Conservation Hub Foundation often engage hunters in talks with a view to making them think about the consequences of their actions to the environment and themselves. We encourage and train hunters on alternative means of livelihood, especially in the areas of poultry, animal husbandry and other businesses. We are glad to report that many hunters in the communities we interacted with are now protecting Wildlife and not killing them as was previously the case.
2019
"Save a Species" Project: A Conservation Initiative for School Students Supported by Rufford Foundation
The “save a species’ initiatives” was a tremendous success. Students were grouped, asked to choose different animals or plants that they felt were threatened in the communities and came up with plans to save them. The contest for the ‘safe a species’ well accepted among them with more zeal and sense of dedication. With the weekly conservation lessons and field experience the students were exposed to, they demonstrated good understanding of practical conservation required in their communities. Students were grouped into two- one saddled with the task of developing a simple conservation plan for animals and the other group designed a plan to conserve plants that are highly sought and logged for firewood in the community.
One of the student groups designed a conservation plan for the Barn owls (Tyto alba), a bird species that is usually killed at sight in their communities. The traditional belief system of the communities considered Owls to mean evil or spell doom. The students scheduled time for talks and sensitization to their parents and other community members on the ecosystem function that the owls play in checking the population of other prey and how innocent they are contrary to the traditional belief that they are witches or controlled by witches and wizards. Most parents believed their children knowing that they would not tell lies. The students were able to save some barn owls that were already captured for killing from their nests people. They also protected the T. alba nestlings that fall off from their nesting places by returning them back to the nests. We were truly surprised at the enthusiasm and passion the students demonstrated in the protection of animals and plants’ species. Other students and groups worked on projects to save the Pied Crow (Corvus albus), Northern Red Bishop (Euplectes franciscanus) and a local plant which is the most sought and used in domestic cooking.
2019
Reduce tree felling in rural communities
The felling of trees for firewood and charcoal for cooking is a common phenomenon in Nigerian rural communities. Through the support of the Rufford Foundation grant, we have been engaging and talking with rural women about alternative cooking approaches. We invited a blacksmith who demonstrated to the women how energy-efficient stoves are made and used.
The program was a success as most youths and women demonstrated the making of the energy-efficient stove with little or no guidance. Some women have gone on to make business ventures out of it. Many thanks to the Rufford Foundation for sponsoring this program.
Sponsors/Donors
