Mr. Martin Andimile (Fellow-Tanzania) has extensive experience working on community wildlife conservation and research throughout Tanzania. Martin holds a degree in Urban and Regional planning from the University of Dar es Salaam and is well conversant with adaptive management, institutional analysis, environmental and land use planning.

On his professional experience, Martin worked with Wami Mbiki project that dealt with helping villagers to set up a Wildlife Management Area (a new form of community managed wildlife conservation area in Tanzania). At Wami Mbiki, his duty was to educate villagers on the importance of conserving wildlife and possible ways of reducing the conflict with wild animals and planning village land uses in the member villages. With his help, the community succeeded in establishing a WMA that has now been gazetted by the government.

Next, he worked in a research NGO called Savannas Forever Tanzania (SFTZ). At SFTZ, he gained extensive experience on conducting interviews with poachers, households, village heads, and focus group discussions with men, women, and environmental committees through Participatory Rural Appraisal approaches in the communities surrounding Serengeti, Tarangire and Ugalla ecosystems. These experiences taught him that most protected areas in Tanzania face natural resource destruction because people who surround them are mostly against conservation due to lack of on the importance of conservation, rather than poverty.

Under the USFWS MENTOR fellowship program, Martin is piloting a sustainable alternatives protein project to communities surrounding the Serengeti ecosystem where bushmeat hunting is widespread. He has already conducted initial meetings with the local communities to identify an alternative protein that can substitute the use of bushmeat. He plans to present the identified protein alternative to the conservation partners around the ecosystem for their support on implementation.

Through the MENTOR Fellowship Program, Martin conducted a site level assessment on “The Illegal Bushmeat Trade in Tanzania: A case study of communities around Katavi National Park”. Click here to see a Fact sheet of his findings.