Mobilising Communities through Social Media with Zilanie Gondwe The Ampliseed Podcast: Inspiring Stories, Episode 4

This is the fourth episode in Ampliseed’s Inspiring Stories series— interviews with leaders who inspire us on our pathway to an equitable and nature positive future, who share with us what brought them to this space, which opportunities inspired them, and what challenges they had to overcome.

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ON THIS EPISODE OF INSPIRING STORIES

"Storytelling is one of of those powerful ways that you can transform people's hearts. And then people's minds." As a well known movement builder in the creative industries and gender activism, over the last few years, Zilanie Gondwe has moved deeper into conservation advocacy. Join us to learn from Zilanie's experiences in how conservation movements can benefit from creative approaches that increase visibility and mobilize communities.

ABOUT TODAY'S GUESTS

Zilanie Gondwe (Invited Guest)

Zilanie Gondwe is the Director of Malawi's Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICON), an independent, non-partisan policy and research organization dedicated to driving nature conservation to the heart of development in Malawi. A well known movement builder in the creative industries and gender activism, over the last few years, Zilanie has moved deeper into conservation advocacy. Zilanie is based in Lilongwe, Malawi.

Ariadne Gorring (co-Host)

Ariadne is the co-CEO of Pollination Foundation. Ariadne is passionate about Indigenous-led cultural conservation, working with the Kimberley Land Council (KLC) for over 20 years on native title and cultural and natural resource management. She is a former Atlantic Fellow for Social Equity at Melbourne University, and recipient of the Barbara Thomas Fellowship in Conservation Financing via The Nature Conservancy Australia. Ariadne is based on Bunurong Country in Melbourne.

Kirsty Galloway McLean (co-Host)

Kirsty leads Ampliseed, a global network connecting practitioners with a rights-based, human-centered approach to building environmental resilience. Her background includes over a decade with the United Nations working in Canada and Japan, and 15 years as CEO of a management and communications consulting firm in Australia. As Executive Director at Pollination Foundation, she works to connect and support international organisations, philanthropists, business, Indigenous and community leaders, and other corporate foundations to drive progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Kirsty is based on Bunurong Country in Melbourne.

SHOW NOTES

• This interview was originally recorded in 2022.

Additional resources

• Learn more about the pangolin

• History of the ivory trade via National Geographic
• The Lilongwe Ecological Corridor Initiative (LECI)
• To find out more about what Zilanie and ICON are up to today, please check out the ICON website https://icon.mw/.

TRANSCRIPT

Zilanie: I live by the words in the work that I do of Sir David Attenborough. He said that saving our planet is a communications challenge. It really is, because storytelling is one of those powerful ways that you can transform people's hearts. And then people's minds.

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Ariadne: From Ampliseed and The Pollination Foundation, welcome to Inspiring Stories. This series makes space for conversations with the leaders who inspire us on our pathway to an equitable and nature positive future. I'm Ariadne Gorring, co-CEO of Pollination Foundation, where we focus on bringing community to the heart of climate solutions.

Kirsty: And I'm your co-host, Kirsty Galloway McLean. I lead Ampliseed, a peer-to-peer learning and doing network of landscape scale conservation projects around the world. Today's episode comes from a Zoom recorded in February, 2022 with Zilanie Tamara Gondwe. As a well known movement builder in the creative industries, and also working in gender activism, over the last few years, Zilanie has moved deeper into conservation advocacy, and she's joining us today to talk about ways conservation movements can benefit from creative approaches that increase visibility and mobilize communities.

Ariadne: ZIlanie's talk was originally a Zoom presentation with slides. For the podcast purposes we have edited this story to make it standalone for you to listen to wherever and whenever suits you best. For any visual exclusions, like maps and other images, please check out the episode notes. So now sit back and enjoy taking time to listen to Zilanie and her inspiring story.

Zilanie: This is the story around the work that my colleagues and the networks that we have here in Malawi do to mitigate the harms and reduce the wildlife, illegal wildlife trafficking and forestry crime in Malawi.

I am the co-founder and director of the Institute for the Conservation of Nature, which is a platform that brings together expertise for communications and advocacy, but also for research around issues and also management of projects. Sometimes , Malawi is described in various journals and publications as being in Eastern or Central Africa, and it's not. It is in Southern Africa, we're landlocked, we're surrounded by three countries, Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique. I come from the north of Malawi, in a district called Rumphi. Nchenachena is in the Highlands, so it's quite hilly where we are. It's in a place called Nyika Plateau, which also has a huge animal reserve and there are many forestry reserves around this area.

So we are a people who are called the Poka people. We live in the clouds and we walk amongst the gods, and Nchenachena literally means 'beautiful, beautiful' twice: 'chena, chena' because it's that gorgeous up there. In Nchenachena, there are a diverse number of activities that people engage in, but the primary one, like most of Malawi, is agriculture.

And like most of Africa, the primary producers of food are women. Over 70% of Malawi's food is produced by smallholder women farmers, and my village in Nchenachena is no different. These women are in these pictures. We're learning how to , produce chili and paprika using organic methodologies, organic farming methodologies in a project that I was involved with them.

And it was great. These women showed me such acceptance. And that was the beginning of my love story, really loving where I come from and understanding the women that I come from in a new way.

so, protest culture is quite strong in Malawi. I get behind women in the village who want to talk about their rights, who want to protect each other from harm, who want to educate their children, who want to increase their livelihoods.

But I also get involved in issues that are very topical , and require, you know, the decision makers at the highest levels to hear us. So I'm very much involved with issues around gender rights, and the visibility and, and of rights for women in particular, as well as anti-corruption issues because there's a very high violence rate here against women and girls. There's a very high rate of sexual violence as well as other kinds of violence, economic, and physical violence. So we went to Parliament to take our protests to the parliamentarians around the issues of trying to, we're trying to pass a termination of pregnancy bill and Malawi is just not trying to hear it, despite the fact that we lose about 200,000 women every year to unsafe abortions.

Also, you know, other rights around sexual reproductive health and , sexual identity included. So we are always ready to stand behind any kinds of injustice because people are not single issues. We are multi issues. So now that you know that I'm an angry black woman and I come from, you know, an entire tribe of angry black women, this should explain why I'm so passionate about protecting the natural resources of my country.

So check this out. What you don't know about Malawi is that it is actually the principal transit hub for the illegal wildlife trade in this part of Africa. So in tiny Malawi we have very porous borders. So porous that what porous means basically is that we don't have very well, um, border security is poor.

You guys are in Australia. We've seen the TV shows. Border security is real! So, Malawi is a principle transit hub for the illegal wildlife trade, and that's especially organized by criminal syndicates that are trafficking ivory, where the trade is going to is mainly Asia. Asia is the biggest market for IWT products. So we've had situations where we track products, And so we know that, you know, products that we may find here in Malawi often come from as far away as places in East Africa or West Africa , because they're tagged, they're geotagged , and, uh, we've had ivory and other pieces of wildlife products turn up in Australia, in Malaysia. It's pretty incredible.

So Malawi is the tiny country that is , located between these two, three other bigger countries that have huge wildlife populations. We have a small wildlife population. It's increasing of course, because we have a strategy to increase our wildlife now with African partners and other partners.

But yeah, so criminal syndicates find it very convenient that Malawi is this very sort of safe, easy to get to country and bring in IWT products from Tanzania, Zambia, the Congo, and so forth, and they're able to ship this out, or they have tried to be able to ship this out by road and by plane. Then it goes on the ships from Mozambique, all across everywhere. So Malawi's actually linked to one of the biggest seizures of all time. So there were 6.9 tonnes of elephant ivory shipped from Lilongwe and seized in Singapore. I think it was 2005 or 2006. And almost three tons were also seized in Mzuzu in the north of Malawi. To my shame, that's where I'm from, up there in the north in 2013. But to my pride, because we, you know, we captured that. Just on the aside, what happened with that ivory and other ivory that we seized in Mzuzu was that the government, through our persuasion, decided to do an ivory burn like Kenya had done. You know, get all the tusks together and burn it because there is no profit to be gained from trading the ivory or reproducing it into something else, it would make a big statement. And so it was agreed that Malawi would have a big ivory burn. And we did. We created the pier at Parliament Building, and it was, it was a really, it was really huge. The president was going to attend, He was going to light the fire. The, the previous day we'd, you know, had a lot of activities around this and around eight o'clock in the evening before the burn, we received a phone call saying that the burn has been called off.

Ahhh, yes. And the present is holding a press briefing as you speak, explaining why Malawi is not going to burn. So it was really disappointing for us. We had to go ahead the next day to this activity where we did not burn the ivory. The pier was still there. The president spoke that we would keep this ivory, and keep it safe and ensure would never end up in the hands of criminals. In the end, a couple of years later, yes, the ivory was destroyed, but it wasn't by fire. No, it did not end up in anybody's pockets, it was destroyed, but the symbolism of the fire would've been really huge for us. We would've really wanted that to happen.

How do we do what we do? Well, we have a multi-agency collaboration. We realized a long time ago, and I, when I say we, the organization I was working directly with at that time was the Lilongwe Wildlife Trust. We realized that in the fight against trafficking, we needed to have a very close relationship with the partners that were struggling to keep the borders closed, um, to prosecute cases because of lack of funding and so forth.

So we created a partnership of, of multi agencies. We have a legislative program. Okay. So we advocate for policy reforms because they were dropping really small sentences on, on offenders, and we needed to have bigger sentences that would make people, you know, fear. And we have also funded, uh, intelligence led investigations because there's a lot of intimidation that occurs, and so a lot of investigations have to happen very secretly. And in order for them to be able to do that, they need to be funded.

So some of the things I'm gonna be able to tell you are gonna sound like I'm not telling you the whole story because some of the cases and investigations are ongoing and the way we do things cannot be revealed to all. But I'm gonna try and tell you as much as we can do. So, we are also very heavily involved with the anti-corruption bureau. We have a great relationship with them. Because of the money laundering component of organized crime in IWT, and we do a lot of work in advocacy. So we work with the anti-corruption bureau, we work with the prosecution service, we work with the police, and we work a lot with development partners.

So this interagency collaboration over the last three years, only four years, only has led to an increase in the efficacy of the way we deal with wildlife crime. Please know that I am coming from the media and advocacy side of this relationship, so I'm not an expert. Prosecution's rose dramatically. We went from seven prosecutions , several arrests, but only seven successful prosecutions in 2017, to 83 in 2020. That is enormous. In 2021 we had 27 prosecutions and we have ongoing cases which are continuing now. So you know, the success rate is absolutely phenomenal.

So Malawi has done a really incredible job of moving the dial. The data that I'm talking about is actually related to pangolin arrests. So we've gone from Malawi being a country that has this incredible animal, this mammal that , most people didn't even know existed because that is the extent of degradation of wildlife spaces in Malawi, to Malawi's being very, very proud of and very protective of the pangolin.

So as you can see, we've had a tenfold, more than tenfold increase in prosecutions because of the public involvement in, in telling the police when they suspect that a crime may be occurring or has occurred. It's really a major step. Another thing that's gone really, really well is that we've been able to get the law changed and sentences are now stiffer.

So there were no custodial sentences almost. People would get fined, but they wouldn't go to prison. But now we have new laws that can send you to prison for up to 18 years. So we're being very, very tough on wildlife crime. The urban area is where people who are less knowledgeable about activities that occur in park related situations. So people around the park are very well versed in issues around wildlife protection, but people in urban areas are disconnected from that, and they're only just learning about how important , these kind of natural resources are. So getting the president and the cabinet, the ambassadors to talk about this at a national and international feeling level was a very huge win for us. Brought a lot of attention to us.

So, as I said, I work in the media side of this, right, and the advocacy side of this. So we had the biggest bust ever, which we, we call the Lin-Zhang Syndicate. This was an international group of Asian and Malawian based smuggling ring of wildlife products. And this occurred here in Malawi and it made the headlines, it took an investigation of many, many, many months.

In Malawi, corruption is really high. So we use the media to keep the cases in the public eye and if they're in the public eye, it's more helpful to help us keep it in the court system also. But we are very proud that the Nation newspaper was with us and decided to go ahead. London Times also carried the story. We had our investigative offices working on this from a tip of somebody who worked in their household, who told somebody who told somebody else, and then an investigation begun. So this undercover team followed the family around, and built up a case over a period of time and eventually arrested the entire family.

But they were released very soon after on a technicality. And so we had to rebuild the case again, and when we arrested the head of the syndicate the second time around, he was given bail and he skipped bail. And four months later he was rearrested when he was trying to leave the country off, across, off one of the poorest borders where we were in action.

So we managed to get him and then we arrested him and then the rest of the family. So it was really quite a dramatic, long, drawn out situation. So when the Times newspaper of the UK broke this story, it gave us a lot of international attention. We got quite a lot of interest from people who and organizations who wanted to support our work , who wanted to understand the issues, support government prosecutions, and so this was really, really good.

That's the importance of media visibility to, to issues like this. So that was story one, the story of the Lin-Zhang syndicates and you know, the work that we, we did with the, of the agencies to bring these people down. We thought that by this bust we would pretty much have knocked a big chink into the international syndicate's work around Southern Africa and in Asia. There is continuing investigations with the links that they have in other parts of this country and outside. So it isn't something that we feel like has ended. It's not like a movie where, you know, you have a case, people go to jail and it's over. In real life, the tentacles of a syndicate are very pernicious and they're long and entangled and it takes a long time, and a long and ongoing work to continue to do this.

I wanted to tell you also the story of the social media side of media and advocacy. So we realize that not everybody's paying attention to the press, and we are really trying to talk to the urban audience about, you know, the importance of protecting our natural resources. And so we're resorted to social media of course, because, you know, there's so many urbanites living on social media.

And one of the first things we did was use a bit of a shock tactic. We took some journalists at the airports to get them to meet the wildlife dog detection unit. These dogs are really beautiful Israeli trained dogs. And we have this wonderful experience where , the journalists watched the dogs.

This is Nikita, she's from the canine unit, and she's sniffing out the luggage. And she finds that a piece of contraband in that bag. So what we had done actually was to ask two of the journalists, to carry pieces of contraband in their luggage, in their bags at the airport and be part of this demonstration. So the other journalist did not know that they were part of this demonstration. So the female journalist whose bag that was found with an ivory trophy and she was arrested. At the site, it was all, you know, on video, the news, Cause we had all the media there, It was all the news people and the print people and photographers and we posted on social media.

We were careful in the language that we used around her arrest, but it was all just a stunt to get people talking about this. So this is her being told by the head of the police unit that she's being arrested for having had this piece of ivory in her bag. I thought that the journalists would cotton onto the fact that this is all staged. But they didn't. No, it was for two hours, a media furore on social media with phone calls from high level people trying to figure out how to help the journalist you know, get out of this arrest. And then, you know, we told everybody that no, this was just a demonstration. And that is how we broke Malawi into having conversations on social media.

So now you find so many conversations on social media, on Facebook and Twitter, which are two of Malawi's favorite social media platforms, about protection for pangolins and ivory and trafficking, including flora. So, you know, we have protected species here, protected trees, and people having these conversations. One of my favorites that I saw was, "Show no mercy to your enemies. Send a pangolin into their yard and call the police." So people know how serious it is to mess with pangolins.

The power of social media for good. It can be really amazing. So, I live by the words in the work that I do of Sir David Attenborough. He said that 'Saving our planet is a communications challenge'. It really is, because storytelling is one of those powerful ways that you can transform people's hearts and then people's minds, because when you touch people's hearts, people feel compelled to appreciate your situation. They find commonality in what you are experiencing or what is happening and how it resonates with them personally, and that begins to open their minds to what needs to be done. Also, we find, obviously with storytelling, when people connect, there is more respect. There is trust. And so being a person who works in this space and as an advocate's advocate, if you like, and as a socialite, I think people understand that I, you know, I, I jump onto and I follow and champion issues of worth.

When I'm putting myself now out in front of conservation issues, people believe what I have to say. So I take that with a lot of responsibility. So when these conversations are being had on Twitter or, or Facebook or people are messaging me to say, Oh, I have a tip, cuz they do, I tell them what they need to do and I pass this information on. I've seen that, you know, social media can be an awesome asset for us here in Malawi in terms of protecting and safeguarding and also litigating for wildlife crime.

We don't just work in the wildlife space. Conservation is so many issues, yeah? Cause we are not, it's not a single issue situation. We also have a lot of work around forestry crime. So it's wildlife is forestry crime. Forestry crime is wildlife crime. It's biodiversity protection that we do. So we have a very big challenge in Malawi because the rate of deforestation is honestly heartbreaking. We lose over 10,000 trees a day in Malawi. This is untenable, this country is so small. And this is largely because of making charcoal, and charcoal is used for cooking in Malawi.

So last year, in January, like a year ago, literally, there was an investigative journalist who had nothing to do with us. We got involved with him after he broke the story. So proud of him. I just wanna give him all his flowers. Cause this was just him and his and the newspaper. They had an expose about charcoal smuggling, illegal smuggling, and they put this out in the paper about the police officers that were involved in allowing these trucks that passed through.

And by the 5th of February, Department of Forestry had responded to the paper and our Malawi parliamentarian's Caucus on Conservation had gotten involved. Now we work very closely with the Caucus for Natural Resources in Parliament and the Hon Chilenga who's a champion for this is so awesome. So they get on board and they begin pushing for answers from the government and the authorities as to how police keep allowing truckloads of charcoal to pass through barriers that are supposed to be preventative.

Because this story broke last January, we were compelled, together with a Malawian parliamentarians committee to do a lot of research in the corruption space of forestry crime and the charcoal trade. And we in July of last year launched the corruption review report. So the corruption report that you can find on our website, www.icon.mw, the role of corruption in wildlife and forestry crime in Malawi.

This is a very comprehensive study undertaking over several months, with our interagency relationships, plus others to look at the issues around corruption and how to tackle them. We launched this report with great pomp and ceremony in July. And it has been a tool that is being used by other organizations to create programs and reports and actions and fight the corruption.

A year later another story, this one we're aware of, about how corruption is endemic in the police service at the top levels. It has been difficult to expose such stories, but now because of the corruption report and all the stories that have been coming out over the last year since the first one broke last January, the media is really at the forefront of putting pressure on the government, exposing high level individuals who are involved in forestry and in wildlife crime.

So this, this is a case that is now in under investigation of a very senior police officer who used authority to allow , timber and um, charcoal trucks to pass through police borders, police checkpoints, when they're supposed to have been impounded, he got them released and so forth. There's also a minister that's implicated in the other story that you've got on here, Politicians compromise projects, forest protection work, and also an officer in the forestry service who's involved in the same. So there's lots of cases going on. So we are very proud of the work that we do.

And the very last story is the story of, you know, David and Goliath, really. The Lilongwe ecological corridor is the city of the long ways plan to protect the spaces around the two intersecting rivers in Lilongwe City. Lilongwe City was planned, not very long ago, just about 40 years ago. It's very young city, but it has grown very, very fast. And because of the issues of corruption, it has grown outside of the plan, shall we say. A lot of buildings and spaces, buildings have been put in places they shouldn't be. There's a lot of encroachment and the places that are supposed to be protected spaces and nature spaces and sanctuaries in the city have suffered for this. So Lilongwe City has a plan to set up an ecological corridor in five zones, and I'm the chairperson of this corridor. I run this committee for the city, which involves various stakeholders. And the point of this is to protect the existing biodiversity, to recreate and bring back the lost flora and fauna and to ensure that future construction, future programs in these spaces fits the standards of the ecological corridor ethos. This is not easy. It is the capital city. There are a lot of political interests involved.

So that's some of the work that we do here in Malawi in our fight to protect our very important spaces. Our President is very much in the forefront of supporting a lot of programs around protecting biodiversity, the environment, and he has concerns for climate change, and he has repeatedly said so. And that we stand and we hold him to always when he steps a little bit maybe outta line, his very first maiden speech, these are the words he said. "As a nation, we cannot keep our date with destiny without settling our date with nature, saving our natural environment, and saving the only home God gave us to live on this earth." That's our president.

Kirsty: Thank you so much Zilanie, for generously sharing these stories of the power of communities to effect change. And that's a key takeaway for me, Ari, and it's really relevant to this series of inspiring speakers, that reminder that an individual with passion can build resonance with others, and that inspires them to take action, and that's how movements build and change takes place. That real power of the individual.

And also Zilanie's stories, I feel, show how incredibly powerful is that role of connectors and communicators in this sort of community space.

Ariadne: Mm. Yeah, thanks Kirsty. I think a few things that really resonated for me, and I heard as Zilanie was talking, was how important it is to surface these hidden issues, and how the media can be used as a leverage point to kind of catalyze political support and action by being able to raise these issues through the media, which catches the attention of key political leaders who are then required to act on what's being published in the media.

The other point that I think is really important is that bold and catalytic change is led by individuals and activists like Zilanie and this often comes with great personal risk and danger, and it really, for me, brings us back to the importance of drawing out the collective voice and having networks like Ampliseed so that change leaders can share their stories and access the support of their peers.

Kirsty: And that's actually a pretty fortuitous segue, because in our next episode, we are delighted to have Shawn Callahan, who is a storytelling specialist, sharing his techniques and tips on how to tell better stories that stick. So, thank you for your time and attention today. We'd like to close with the special thank you to the BHP Foundation, whose support makes this work possible.

And if you're interested in hearing more inspiring stories with us, please do subscribe to the Ampliseed podcast series or head over to our website to learn more.