Outreach

We have organised a national campaign to raise awareness on sea turtle conservation, focusing on all our field sites and on Libreville, Gabon's capital. Our strength has come from the combined initiatives and resources of all our Partners, who have many years of experience in environmental education. Our goal is to raise awareness among people of all ages, visiting national parks, living around them or in cities, where they don't have much oppourtunity to discover the rich biodiversity of Gabon. We feel it is essential to have a sense of stewardship toward Gabon's natural heritage and of responsibility toward its preservation for future generations.

We run a large number of seminars, presentations, tours and informal discussions with members of the public, coastal communities and schoolchildren. We produce and distribute educational materials such as turtle posters, pamphlets, banners, calendars, stickers, colouring books, and even turtle costumes and puppets. For instance, they are distributed to weekend visitors to Pongara National Park travelling from Libreville on the shuttle ferries, or to school classrooms along the coast, ecology clubs, patrons of the French Cultural Centre in Libreville, tourists and visitors from overseas, government officials, and fishermen and coastal villagers.

Due to its vicinity to Libreville, natural beauty and high nesting density, Pongara National Park receives many visitors and is an ideal location for our environmental education. Some of the harmful practices we try to minimise are the use of quad bikes on the beach and jet-skis offshore, inappropriate behaviour at night while observing nesting females, beach litter, presence of domestic dogs and artificial lights on the beach.

We have been working extensively with children using the techniques of role-play, enacting scenes and threats from the life history of sea turtles in the schools and villages near sea turtle habitats. For this, we held a costume-making workshop in Libreville to teach educators themselves how to create durable, low-cost costumes for use in dramatic role-play.

Attendees created leatherback and green turtle, jellyfish and crab costumes, and learned how to facilitate activities using these materials. Each partner now has one of each costume for use in local outreach, and the knowledge to be able to hold similar workshops with other teachers at various field sites. We also made a training film during the workshop, and copies have been distributed to partners for use at their sites.

Our activities and initiatives have frequently been presented in the national media, through interviews, documentaries, TV spots and newspaper articles. A 60-minute documentary entitled "De Bébés Tortues à Mamans Luths" (from Baby Turtles to Mother Leatherbacks) by Innocent M'Badouma of TeleAfrique, was filmed in Pongara NP and its premiere was a very well-attended event at the French Cultural Centre in June 2007. A sea turtle publicity short is being shown on two giant flat-panel screens overlooking the "Bord de Mer", Libreville's busiest road. A number of additional Partnership films have been relased to broadcast Partnership activities as widely as possible.

Click here to download our 2011-2012 Outreach and Media annual report.

Click here to download our 2010-2011 Outreach and Media annual report.

Hug a Turtle Today!

We have just created new turtle models for our growing "arribada". There are now huggable, life-size turtle models in Libreville, Pongara, Mayumba, Cap Esterias, and Gamba!

The Main Event

National Sea Turtle Day is an event that is celebrated each year during turtle nesting season. It has grown from a single school in 2005 to over 2000 participants at 5 coastal sites!

New Murals

A stroll around the towns of Mayumba and Cap Esterias will reveal some beautiful new works of public art. Pepito, a young Gabonese artist, won the 2010 Turtle Day art contest and with it, funding to reproduce his drawings on some prominent walls in the towns. There are now turtle publicity murals on the walls of the high school, an elementary school, and on the main market street in Mayumba, and on the elementary school in Cap Esterias.

Sea Turtle Expo

The Mayumba Sea Turtle Expo gave over 700 students from the world's number one leatherback turtle nesting beach a chance to experience a face-to-face encounter with one of the sea's gentle giants.