Wildlifedirect.org uses social platforms like blogs and websites to spread awareness of wildlife conservation. The website of wildlifedirect.org puts their goals as “raising funds for conservation. Using the internet, we bring supporters and conservationists together through online diaries or blogs to enable individual donors around the world to communicate directly with the people that they are funding.”
I heard about Wildlifedirect.org at the Poptech conference in Camden Maine . The aim of the conference is to bring together people towards the goal of “world-changing people, projects and ideas”.
The story of Anthony Kasanga was told by Paula Kahumbu Executive Director of WildlifeDirect.org. Paula was named one of the 16 fellows of the prestigious PopTech Social Innovation Fellows program of 2009 for her work at WildlifeDirect.
Anthony Kasanga is a Masai who were traditionally Lion hunters but Anthony decided to form a group called the Lion Guardians to save the lions and educate the tourists who come to Mbirikani Group Ranch in southern Kenya. Anthony uses a blog to educate people on the project http://lionguardians.wildlifedirect.org . The collective efforts of their activities saved 50 lions from being killed last year. When one of the blog readers mentioned a scholarship at the Oxford University in England , Anthony applied and was accepted and is now at Oxford. Great story. The issue of Lions in Kenya being poisoned by the local population to prevent them from eating livestock is one of the causes that Paula Kahumbu mentioned in her talk at PopTech. She also said that wildlifedirect.org was using websites but the adoption of websites is not very high in Kenya so they are working on projects like a Wildlifetracker where the local population ca report on the wildlife they see by using mobile phones.with the help of a organization called http://www.ushahidi.com/. I spoke to the Erik Hersman co-founder of Ushahidi which I will be uploading to Youtube soon and he said Ushahidi means ”testimony” in Swahili and is a open source application that enables gathering crisis information from the general public in near real-time using mobile phones which are more prevalnet that PCs in many parts of the world.
Read a great recap on the PopTech Blog by Michelle Riggin- Ransom and Paula Kahumbu’s own blog post at wildlifedirect.org
See the video about Wildlifedirect.org here and hope you will give them a helping hand.
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