Atingo Elimu
Atingo Elimu
We created Atingo Elimu to develop and support projects that focus on outreach, education, and capacity building relevant to tropical forest conservation. It grew out of the need to expand our work under Partners for Red Colobus as we got more involved in projects not directly related to red colobus conservation.
What is Atingo Elimu?
“Atingo” means “achievement” in Esperanto and signifies having pursued and attained a goal.
“Elimu” means “education” in Swahili.
Together, we hope to achieve conservation through education.
We chose to uniquely combine these words because Esperanto and Swahili are languages that grew out of the need or desire to break down communication barriers between linguistic groups. They both borrow heavily from other languages and are inherently international in scope. Inspired by the origin of these languages, The Forest Collective partners with experts and organizations to promote tropical forest conservation through outreach, education, and the arts and empower people, regardless of age, background, or language, to conserve their forest ecosystems.
Our Goal
To promote the conservation of tropical forests and threatened species through outreach, education, and capacity building.
Threatened African Primates Image Collection
Using the data archive MorphoSource and in collaboration with Doug Boyer and his team at Duke University (USA) and Thomas Struhsaker (one of the world’s experts on red colobus), we have created an online, searchable repository for photographs and videos of threatened African primates. We hope this repository will help to document and facilitate the study of inter- and intra-specific variation in morphology, pelage, and behavioral ecology of threatened African primates and support their conservation. We started with images of red colobus (over 400 are now available for download) and will slowly be expanding to other threatened African taxa. We encourage you to visit this new digital archive, where you can freely download images for educational purposes, with approval from the photographers. For more information, please contact Joshua Linder (JLinder@theforestcollective.org).
Facilitating the expansion of Improved Cookstoves in tropical Africa
In partnership with the Institute for Integrative Conservation at the College of William and Mary (USA), we are developing free, downloadable resources that will promote dialogue about and facilitate the deployment of Improved Cookstoves (ICS) in the African tropical forest zone. Extraction of fuelwood and production of charcoal used in traditional three-stone fires often is a major contributor to forest degradation and loss. ICS aim to be more efficient than traditional three-stone fires, thereby reducing the pressure on forest resources. We are gathering information on building and evaluating ICS across tropical Africa. With the Institute for Integrative Conservation, we will, then, create an online database that allows forest users and conservation practitioners to access this information and connect with those of have experience building and deploying ICS.
