Historic agreement signed to help forest elephants and local farmers successfully coexist in Gabon

Libreville, 21 March 2025 – As the world marks the United Nations’ International Day of Forests today, Space for Giants is proud to announce a landmark agreement to help ensure that subsistence farmers in the Central African nation of Gabon are able to successfully share the country’s forests with its extensive elephant population.

In partnership with the Ministry of Water and Forests of Gabon and the Wildlife Conservation Society, Space for Giants has signed a historic agreement to tackle human elephant conflict in the Central African nation to enable the installation of a further 1,800 mobile fences.

The project, funded by the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI), aims to transform the livelihoods of tens of thousands of subsistence farmers over the next 2 years and marks a significant step forward in mitigating human-elephant conflict in Gabon. It builds on the work already done by Space for Giants, in support of the Ministry of Water and Forests, that has transformed how HEC is addressed in Gabon since 2022.

“The Human-Wildlife Conflict, and more specifically the Human-Elephant Conflict, has been growing at a phenomenal rate for over a decade, and is contributing to the increasing impoverishment of rural populations who make their living from agriculture, while at the same time exposing them to the risks associated with the presence of elephants in the vicinity of their villages,” said Maurice Ntossui Allogo, Gabon’s Minister of Water and Forest. “Through the CAFI program, we are striving to mitigate this increasingly recurrent conflict. Through studies, we are also trying to implement the policy of building electric barriers.”

On the 29th of January 2025 Space for Giants, alongside Mr Allogo, inaugurated its 1,000th mobile electric fence, celebrating the innovative initiative which has already helped provide a more secure livelihood to nearly 15,000 beneficiaries across Gabon.

The CAFI funded project will now scale up Space for Giants’ capacity and reach across Gabon to ensure that subsistence farmers across the country are able to live peacefully alongside the critically endangered forest elephants.

Gabon is the largest refuge of African forest elephants (Loxodonta Cyclotis), with an estimated 95,000 remaining. However, it is also the only country in the world dealing with human-elephant conflict on a national scale, with elephants present in 47 out of 48 administrative departments. Electric fencing has proven to be the only effective mitigation to address HEC occurring to such an extent.

The CAFI-funded project will see Space for Giants install 1,800 mobile fences in all nine provinces of the country, expand human-elephant conflict outreach and improve agricultural practices for sustainable food production in Gabon.

Marie-Gabrielle Imandimori Aroma is a smallholder farmer who has benefited from the fence project in Eshira village, Ogooue-Maritime province. “I am the leader of an agricultural cooperative, and I can say that it is thanks to this fence, we have been able to carry out multiple harvests, feed our families, and achieve a fairly stable yield,” she said. “The elephants don’t even get close to our farm anymore. We aspire to expand our production with the help of this tool.

“For almost eight years, we fought elephants. There were moments when you could hear them lurking behind the house.  Every night, the routine was to rise from sleep to bang on the cans and barrels. They wreaked havoc on our crops, and we struggled to replant what they destroyed. But since the electric fence was installed, the situation has changed. Now, we can consume all that we harvest. We plant and sell, and it aids us in providing for our children.”

Space for Giants will work alongside WCS, the administrator of the CAFI project to achieve the desired outcomes over the next 2 years.  The project will benefit an estimated 27,000 beneficiaries, improving their food security and securing their livelihoods.

In order to strategically distribute mobile electric fencing throughout the country, Space for Giants has already established provincial bases in five out of the nine provinces in Gabon. These provincial teams continually deploy fences, conduct outreach, conduct monitoring and evaluation missions and train beneficiaries. This successful model has allowed the project to grow with support from a number of national and international funders and partners. CAFI financing is testament to the belief in the Space for Giants approach and its adoption by subsistence farmers.

‘‘Space for Giants congratulates the Ministry of Water and Forests for securing this CAFI financing to continue supporting subsistence farmers living alongside forest elephants,”  Eric Chehoski, Space for Giants Country Director, explained. “Our fencing programme has proved extremely successful for Gabon’s context and we look forward to fulfilling the role as technical partner to the Ministry to achieve meaningful outcomes under this project, both for the Gabonese people and the critically endangered forest elephants.”

WCS will be working closely with Space for Giants as our partner on this project. Mr. Gaspard Abitsi, WCS Gabon Country Director, told how he is excited by such a vital initiative occurring at this important time.

He said: “This project is the result of an efficient collaborative effort between Gabonese government agencies, conservation NGOs and the CAFI national focal point which allowed in an extremely constrained time to mature this project and thus provide a rapid response to the Prime Minister's call-in mid-December 2024. This is a crucial contribution from the international community which consolidates its support for the Gabonese government's constant efforts in the preservation of the forests and wildlife of the Congo Basin. This first initiative will certainly encourage other donors to invest more in this issue, in order to improve the peaceful coexistence between people and the forest elephant in Gabon.”