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FoA Abroad
FoA’s work abroad includes several projects in the Ferlo region in Senegal. For more than 30 years it has partnered with the National Park Directorate to stop poaching of the region’s elephants and provide equipment, vehicles and training.
FoA has also worked in partnership to restore species that were wiped out and helping to repair habitats and encourage plant-based meals by restoring water flow and establishing gardens.
With FoA’s help, scimitar-horned oryxes, which were wiped out by hunters and declared extinct in the wild in 2000, are once again thriving in the Ferlo North Wildlife Reserve within a protected habitat of 12,355 acres.
In 1999, FoA partnered with Senegalese and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, which had gathered up the few oryxes left and allowed them to live in 2,000 acres of the Hai-Bar Wildlife Reserve in the Israeli Negev Desert. The Israelis invited Senegalese to the region to train on how to care of the oryxes and then donated three young males and five young female oryxes to Senegal. In 2002, FoA sponsored the erection of a wire fence to enclose 1,235 acres of land near the Fulani village of Katane to protect the landscape and in 2003 eight oryxes were transported from Guembeul to the Ferlo. Now more than 550 live in the region.
FoA is continuing to help restore species to the region and is working on re-introducing ostriches and other species.
Promoting gardens
Most recently, FoA has worked in the Ferlo region to help restore the damaged ecosystem and help residents establish gardens for plant-based meals to benefit wildlife and the environment.
Once an idyllic landscape, the region’s grassy plains sprawled across 2.2 million square miles of Africa, from Senegal on the Atlantic all the way to the Sudan on the Red Sea. But the soil became exposed and damaged from overgrazing.
Working with the Directorate as well as Senegal’s Water and Forest Directorate and the United Nation’s Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which declared the Ferlo a “Biosphere Reserve,” FoA is helping to establish water-efficient gardens with drip irrigation to help stimulate sustainable meat-free food sources.
More than 8,000 square miles of land will be rehabilitated under this project.