NADA – Nsombou Abalghe-Dzal Association

• 150 communities in Ogooue-Ivindo, Nyanga and Ngounie provinces reconnect with their lands and forests – documenting existing practices, encouraging intergenerational knowledge transmission (including community heritage centres), integrating ancestral practices into daily ecosystem preservation, raising awareness of traditional knowledge’s value, conducting scientific research, and participatory mapping across all 150 villages.

• Communities are well organised and able to effectively govern and manage their natural resources – assessing existing governance structures, supporting inclusive local governance bodies, training communities on the ICCA (Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas) concept, developing local governance rules and management systems, socio-economic studies/mapping, and supporting implementation, monitoring and adaptation of local management systems.

• Communities’ rights over natural resources are secured and exercised in Gabon – advocacy with authorities for recognition of community rights, evidence-based data collection, alliance-building with parliamentarians, strengthened collaboration with regional/international institutions (COMIFAC, ICCA Consortium, REPALEAC, UNDP), workshops on community rights and forest governance, capacity building for public officials and civil society, and raising community awareness of their rights.

NADA (Nsombou Abalghe-Dzal Association) is a Gabonese non-profit community-based organisation created in December 2019, committed to community rights, conservation and sustainable livelihoods. Its name, drawn from the Kota and Fang languages, means “Association of Fishers and Hunters to Protect the Village”. Founded in 2019, NADA emerged from a community movement to protect the Massaha forest from logging, asserting the right of communities to manage their ancestral lands — a response to a centralised and poorly inclusive conservation model, based on the belief that those who live with the forest are its most legitimate guardians. From Massaha, NADA has become a major player in community-based conservation in Gabon, building relationships of trust through participatory mapping, biodiversity monitoring and para-ecology, with particular attention to women’s leadership.