Establishing Wildlife Crime Units to boost the fight against poaching and IWT in the Congo Basin

Register Now Forest elephant decline was estimated to be 62% across the Congo Basin between 2002 and 2011 and up to 90% in some landscapes between 2011 and 2015.

In this presentation, Alain Ononino, Law Enforcement Coordinator for Cameroon, World Wide Fund (WWF), will present WWF's shift in traditional anti-poaching and law enforcement approach to a more holistic one. WWF is establishing field wildlife crime units with a focus on intelligence gathering, support to targeted/intelligence-led operations, judiciary follow-up and communication, combined with policy influencing at the national and regional levels.

Speaker Bios

Alain Bernard Ononino, Law Enforcement Coordinator for Cameroon, WWF

Alain Bernard Ononino is a Cameroonian who has been involved in Anti-Poaching and Law enforcement support for almost 12 (twelve) years. He is a Lawyer who started his career in wildlife law enforcement support and the fight against corruption in 2007 within an NGO called LAGA (The Last Great Ape Organization) and he contributed in establishing the first model of collaboration between an NGO and the government in the fight against wildlife crime. His duties ranged from setting up and managing informant network, supervising field undercover investigators, supporting field arrest operations and judiciary follow-up of wildlife cases in court. Alain contributed in replicating the LAGA model in four countries (Congo, Gabon, Central African Republic, and Guinea-Conakry), which then became the EAGLE network. After seven years in LAGA, he joined WWF as Law enforcement coordinator for Cameroon and is currently the Policy Lead for the Central Africa Wildlife Crime Programme. Alain supported the roll out of the Zero Poaching toolkit (www.zeropoaching.com) in three out of the five countries WWF is working on in the Congo Basin. This includes the implementation of key activities such as the testing of a community-based wildlife crime prevention framework in South east Cameroon, the capacity building of rangers on the respect of human rights in anti-poaching activities in Cameroon and the development of a complaint resolution mechanism in Cameroon and DRC. He is currently working on establishing a Central Africa wildlife crime regional coordination hub which is a strategic mechanism aimed to facilitate, coordinate, leverage resources and partnerships, and provide support capacity for better implementation of Wildlife Crime projects and programmes by five WWF Offices in the region in order to contribute to save Congo Basin’s elephants and great apes.