The CI with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Secretariat have launched an Indigenous Leaders Conservation Fellowship and it?s a pleasure to announce that our Executive Director, Dominique Bikaba has been one of the four fellows who has won it among about 130 applicants.

These fellowship winners were announced were announced last October at the Tenth Conference of Parties (COP10) of the CBD in Nagoya (Japan) where Dominique Bikaba who represented the fellows at this United Nations event expressed profound gratitude on behalf of the other fellows and on his own name to the CI and the CBD for selecting them.

Mr. Bikaba?also took this opportunity to announce the project on which he will be working through this fellowship. The project that will be evaluating the ability to merge traditional knowledge with science and new technology for conservation of protected areas in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo will focus a comparative study on management policies of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the Itombwe Natural Reserve and the Bushema Community Reserve. The other targets for this project will be on land tenure and conflicts in these protected areas? region by assessing existence of potential corridors between them.

?The CI office in DRC as well as conservation officials in DRC have welcomed this project announcement and are eager to use the project results in the design of new protected areas, especially the community forests, as well as in management in conservation

It is a yearlong fellowship and the other fellows are respectively from Fiji, Guatemala and the Philippines.

Congratulations Dominique!

For more information, please visit:?http://www.conservation.org/discover/centers_programs/itpp/pages/indigenous_fellowship.aspx

Strong Roots is mentioned in New York Times blog “How To Change The World”?by Nicholas D. Kristof:

I have an essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about do-it-yourself foreign aid, but I know that it won?t fully answer the question that many readers will have: What can I do? Originally we had a sidebar addressing that question to go with the article, but it had to be cut for space reasons ? and so I?ve found a home for it here on my blog.

So for those who want to do more, here are my suggestions….

Or you can volunteer at a soup kitchen or mentor a child, or find other ways to help. A stay-at-home mom in Colorado, Jenny Murphy, heard about Lisa Shannon (whose work with Run for Congo Women I describe in the magazine article) but isn?t a runner and wasn?t in a position to go off to Congo. But she browsed the Internet and through Facebook connected with a remarkable man in Congo running schools there. Now she is passionately engaged in an organization, Strong Roots, that supports those schools and works on conservation issues around Kahuzi-Biega National Park in Eastern Congo. That?s a reflection of what technology makes possible: a Mom in Colorado giving people hope in eastern Congo.

Please check out?the entire article and more wonderful organizations?here: http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/how-to-change-the-world/