Empowering women from local communities through wildlife conservation: the Tajik Women and Conservation Initiative in Tajikistan

Societies across the world have long been undergoing important changes affecting women and advancing their rights and opportunities. Traditionally women were the "custodians of the hearth". Increasingly now women have access... [ view full abstract ]

Societies across the world have long been undergoing important changes affecting women and advancing their rights and opportunities. Traditionally women were the "custodians of the hearth". Increasingly now women have access to the same opportunities, and same pay as men. However, change is not evenly spread across the countries. In Central Asia women still have no opportunity to pursue many educational and employment opportunities, especially in remote mountainous communities. Tajikistan was not an exception until recently. 

Panthera (an American NGO dedicated to the conservation of wild cats across the globe) has been actively working in Tajikistan since 2009 and understands the importance of empowering local communities for the benefit of wildlife conservation, through support and development of community-based conservancies. 

Panthera, together with its partner organization Hunting and Conservation Alliance of Tajikistan (H&CAT) saw that wildlife conservation could be a way of empowering women in remote communities. During the summer of 2017, in consultation and cooperation with two community-based conservancies, "Burgut" in Alichur village and "Parcham" in Ravmeddara, the "Tajik Women and Conservation Initiative" was launched, aiming to train women in these two conservancies as rangers, trekking and hunting guides, and essentially opening up the opportunities for women to considered alike their male counterparts. 

These two conservancies are successfully protecting wildlife, conducting sustainable international hunts, welcoming tourists from different countries for wildlife observation tours, photo-hunting and yak-safari. With foreign female trekking and hunting tourists increasingly inquiring about being guided by women-guides, the conservancies themselves easily recognized that there was an opportunity to empower the women in the communities, and the benefits from doing so could be used to negotiate the barriers of culture, tradition and religion. The Tajik Women and Conservation Initiative, to be eventually scaled up to other conservancies in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, can become a successful model where wildlife conservation can help promote education and employment opportunities for women, with full support from the conservative communities they came from.