An FAO approach
G.S. Child
G.S. CHILD, Wildlife and National Parks Officer in the FAO Forestry Department took part in the organization of the College of African Wildlife Management at Mweka, Tanzania. He was also FAO's Regional Wildlife and National Parks Officer for Africa.
Certain underlying factors complicate the attempt to establish programmes for training wildlife and national parks personnel. One is that wildlife management, although evolving rapidly, is a relatively new subject area. Another is that the discipline is frequently confused with zoology, biology, natural history and even veterinary science. In fact, it involves all of these disciplines and many more. A zoologist is thus no more a wildlife manager than a botanist is a forester; but, unfortunately, many influential decision makers do not seem to be sufficiently aware of this.
The aim Of FAO has been to ensure, as much as possible, that training is both broadly based and at the same time relevant to the policies and objectives of wildlife and national parks management of individual countries. Though there may be variations from country to country in the emphasis placed on different approaches to wildlife and wildland management, the underlying principles remain constant. The pressing need is to give staff members of wildlife and national parks administrations good training in the management of the resources for which they are responsible.
In developing its assistance in Africa, FAO has tended to recognize three broad levels of training:
· Lower-level training for guards, guides, scouts, rangers and similar personnel in national parks, wildlife or forestry services.
· Middle or intermediate-level training for wardens or technical personnel.
· Higher-level training for (a) professional-grade management officers, wildlife ecologists and biologists, and (b) research officers.
Lower level. There is a wide range of tasks with which lower-level personnel may be concerned. A park guide, for example, will be occupied solely by conducting tourists on visits, a game scout may be engaged almost entirely in dealing with dangerous wild animals, and a wildlife guard will be concerned exclusively with stopping poaching.
Training personnel in such activities should involve, wherever possible, practical and field work as vehicles of instruction. Experience has shown that the optimum duration of such courses is two or three months and that, in general, they should not exceed six months. Refresher courses should last a few weeks, but training in specialized skills (such as the collection and preservation of biological specimens, the immobilization of wildlife, and taxidermy) may require longer periods of instruction.
Lower-level training has tended to be carried out at the country level but there are, of course, exceptions. In countries which have limited wildlife or national parks resources, candidates are often sent for training to neighbouring states.
Two main approaches have been adopted for the practical implementation of training programmes at this basic level. One' adopted by such countries as Tanzania, Nigeria, Botswana, Kenya, the Central African Republic and Mozambique, is the establishment of specialist institutions, often in conjunction with allied natural resources disciplines such as forestry or fisheries. These schools conduct regular courses and ensure a steady flow of qualified personnel. A second approach, adopted by others, has been to arrange on-the-job courses as the necessity arises; Zambia and Zaire, among others, have done this. These involve a minimum of capital expenditure and have the flexibility necessary to take account of the various kinds of requirements and the various types of work to which the participants will later be assigned. They also have the advantage of relating field instruction to the management and development of the wildlife area of the national park in which they are conducted.
Middle level. The status of park, game or wildlife wardens varies considerably from country to country. Wildlife and park agencies have frequently been administratively structured differently from agencies responsible for other natural resources (e.g., agriculture, livestock and forestry) which have distinct categories of professional and technical officers. This legacy accounts, to some extent, for the varying responsibilities assigned to different persons, all of whom may have been trained at the middle [eve]. It is unsatisfactory because the recipient of such training may head a :national park service or wildlife department in one country; in another he may be in a staff category running parallel to, but possibly independent of, a professional cadre. In yet a third country, he may be subordinate to a professional officer who himself may not even be qualified as a professional wildlife or national parks officer. One unfortunate result of this is that in some developing countries wardens are expected to fulfil both professional and technical roles with the lesser rank and remuneration of technical officers. The long-term aim should be to have both professional and technical officers trained in appropriate disciplines and exposed to relevant experience.
It might seem initially that there is a significant variation in the requirements of middle-level training among different countries. However, on closer examination, the differences probably lie more in the emphasis and depth to which various activities are pursued. Thus, with the head of a service, the stress would probably be on administration with only a general appreciation of the resource for which he is responsible, while a warden in charge of a park, who has a similar role, would be in more direct contact with the resource base of the park. At the other extreme, a warden with direct responsibility for part of a wild life reserve, under the supervision of a professional officer, would have minimal administrative responsibilities and be in a position to put most of his effort into field work.
There may be significant differences in the training requirements of various agencies, particularly where responsibility for management of wildlife and national parks is shared by more than one organization. On extreme is the trainee warden from a national parks administration concerned with protection and management of park resources through recreational wildlife viewing and photography. The other is the warden, sponsored by a game or wildlife department, involved with utilization such as hunting, cropping and game control.
In Africa, FAO has sponsored a regional approach to middle-level training based on the examples of the College of African Wildlife Management at Mweka, Tanzania, and the School for Training of Wildlife Specialists at Garoua, Cameroon. Both schools currently offer courses at two levels. At Mweka, the older of the two schools, it is interesting to note that apparently an increasing number of the organizations which send students to the college prefer to take advantage of only the higher-level diploma course in their training programmes. This, in part, is a reflection of the fact that, when an organization decides to spend money for training, it may decide it is more cost effective to invest in a higher level of training.
Another contributory factor is probably the tendency for the lower end of the spectrum of medium-level training to become the upper end of the spectrum of lower-level training. In other words, it reflects the general upgrading of the calibre of staff within wildlife and national parks organizations. Additionally, the schemes of service of some agencies do not include posts for which the lower-level certificate training was conceived. In the future, it is anticipated that such training will increasingly be carried out at the country level.
At Garoua, courses were originally designed for candidates who had undergone basic training courses in forestry. With wildlife management now firmly established as a discipline in its own right, the school's courses 'have been modified to accommodate students with natural science and other ecologically oriented backgrounds.
Both schools are designed to cater to students from the national parks and wildlife agencies of African countries, and virtually all their students are sponsored by these agencies. Currently - with minor exceptions - trainees at all levels undergo the same programme of instruction at each institution. There is, however, a growing conviction that there should be scope for specialization within the programmes of the two establishments, and it has been suggested that this might take the form of subject area options. An approach to initiating this could be that while wildlife and game department students concentrate on course work especially relevant to their work, national parks trainees could pursue alternative subjects in their field of interest. Conservation education, interpretation and extension are subjects which have also been suggested as appropriate for specializations.
Higher level. Training at a higher level for professional staff concerned with management and research in national parks has, for the most part, been carried out at universities in North America and Europe. An obvious drawback to much of this training, from the point of developing countries, is that ecologically it is geared to temperate wildlife species and to the ecosystems of developed countries. In the short term, this problem can be alleviated by providing orientation courses in African ecosystems for returning graduates or by selecting as candidates for training overseas persons who have wildlife or national parks experience and training in their own region. For Africa, top graduates of Mweka and Garoua would fit this Latter category.
WILDLIFE STUDENTS OBSERVING A TRANQUILIZED ELEPHANT training in which FAO pioneered
With this in mind, a one-year postgraduate diploma course is now being offered at Mweka. It aims at two categories of university graduates: those in wildlife management, wildlife ecology, conservation or allied disciplines from overseas; and those from African institutions of natural sciences, forestry, range management or similar disciplines.
However, the long-term policy should be to develop appropriate courses for higher-level wildlife management personnel at universities in developing countries. This process has already begun with the inclusion of wildlife subjects in the curricula of training institutions in Asia, Latin America and Africa. These preliminary initiatives have raised several questions that need to be resolved in designing adequate programmes for training in wildlife and national parks management. Perhaps two of the most fundamental are (1) whether to treat the subject as an ecological science, and thus put it in a faculty of science or school of biology, or as a form of estate management linked, for example, to a school of natural resources or department of forestry; and (2) whether, initially, to offer undergraduate courses or to concentrate on postgraduate training for those who have qualified in biological or related natural resource disciplines.
On balance, it is suggested that postgraduate courses with an estate-management orientation will more quickly turn out the professional managers required for an effective wildlife and national parks organization; and one would look to the "ecological science" approach to provide research workers in this particular subject matter area.
Future. Little quantitative data are available on manpower requirements. FAO was involved in a study for the Sahel countries of Africa, during the course of which a methodology was proposed and used as a basis for estimating the manpower requirements at the three levels for the wildlife and national parks organizations of the Comité permanent inter-Etats de lutte contre la secheresse dans le Sahel (CILSS). Most projections of training requirements in Africa have been made on the basis of estimates obtained from heads of the relevant services.
There is thus a need to carry out a comprehensive manpower requirement study by regions to generate ac curate information as a basis for planning. Only when such information is available can a realistic appraisal of possible options to meet identified needs be made.
Much research has been undertaken regarding wildlife in Africa. However, a large proportion of this effort has been of an academic nature and not directed toward accumulating data relevant to management. Furthermore, the research that has been management oriented has had little impact because results have not been translated into management prescriptions.
Some governments have recognized these problems and have established procedures and institutions designed to plan and exercise control over research. There is often a need to ensure that wildlife research programmes do not become exaggerated in relation to research effort in other sectors. It is also necessary to ensure that individual research projects fit into an overall programme designed to meet national requirements.
Although much remains to be done, it has to be concluded that in recent years there has been good progress in the field of wildlife and national parks training in Africa.
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An FAO chainsaw manual CHAINSAWS IN TROPICAL FORESTS This is a sample page from an illustrated manual in the FAO Training Series No. 2 (see illustrations, page 25 of the manual). This book is available in English, French and Spanish through the FAO Sales Agents listed on the inside back cover of Unasylva. Figure
SCIES A CHAÎNE EN FORÊT TROPICALE Fac-similé d'une page extraite d'un manuel illustré paw dans la collection FAO: Formation n° 2 (voir illustrations p. 25 de l'ouvrage). Ce livre est disponible en anglais, espagnol et français auprès des agents et dépositaires FAO dont la liste figure a la page 3 de la couverture d'Unasylva. Figure
MOTOSIERRAS EN LOS BOSQUES TROPICALES He aquí un ejemplo del manual ilustrado publicado en la Colección FAO: Capacitación N° 2 (pare las ilustraciones, véase la página 25 del manual). Este libro está disponible en español, francés e inglés en las librerías y agentes de yentas de la FAO que aparecen en la lista del interior de la contratapa de Unasylva. Figure
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