Watch the Parks 30th Anniversary Video
The 30th Anniversary of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park commemorates conservation achievements, despite increasing pressures. On this occasion, the Park ramps up tourism-oriented efforts with the unveiling of its new official website – https://ndoki.org – and marks this celebration with a special video.
Republic of Congo’s Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park commemorates 30 years of conservation, science and local community development, to retain its status as one of the true wilderness areas left on the African continent. Created on December 31, 1993, and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2012 as part of the wider Sangha Trinational landscape, the Park has been administered since 2014 through a Public-Private Partnership agreement between Congo’s Ministry of Forest Economy (MEF) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), creating the Nouabalé-Ndoki Foundation.
“We didn’t detect any elephants killed in the Park this year, a first for the Park since we’ve began collecting data. This success comes after nearly a decade of concerted efforts to protect forest elephants from armed poaching in the Park. With prospering collaboration between MEF and WCS, and to address the escalating threats to the region’s wildlife, the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park made significant investments in the ranger force, with training to reinforce professionalism, self-defense capabilities, and adherence to both the law and human rights,” explains Ben Evans, the Park’s management unit director.
Long protected by its isolation, Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park has been increasingly exposed to anthropogenic threats, notably linked to the development of road infrastructure and growing demographic pressure. The Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB) and other neighboring logging concessions, the majority of which are FSC-certified, work with the Park to apply results of the research conducted by WCS on wildlife to limit the impacts of logging and road building. As key stakeholders in the creation of the Park, the Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities of the neighboring villages of Bomassa and Makao play a central role in its management and governance. The Park works with communities to improve their livelihoods, promote sustainable resource use in the Park periphery, and ensure people can benefit from the Park.
"The Park has created long-term jobs, which are rare in the region, and has brought substantial benefits to neighboring communities through the creation of schools and health centers, and access to clean water. Tourism is also emerging as a promising avenue for economic growth," said Gabriel Mobolambi, chief of Bomassa village. The Makao and Bomassa health centers receive up to 250 patients a month. The Park provides continuous access to primary education for nearly 300 pupils in Bomassa and Makao. In Bomassa, 80% of heads of households are Park employees.
Nouabalé-Ndoki has recently become the first certified Gorilla FriendlyTM National Park, ensuring best practices are in place for all gorilla-related operations, from tourism to research, with active support for and from the Park’s neighboring communities. In alignment with the national policy aimed at promoting a green economy in the Congo, the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park initiated a tourism development program, with the goal to generate 15% of its budget from tourism revenue. For its 30th Anniversary, the Park unveils its tourism-oriented web platform - https://ndoki.org. To visit Nouabalé-Ndoki, find more information on the new website!
In 1993, recognizing the importance of this area for biodiversity conservation, the government of Congo created the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. The partnership between MEF and WCS has grown stronger and ensures the Park remains one of the world’s last truly wild spaces, and one of the few areas where populations of elephants and great apes have remained stable. For decades, commitment, cooperation and professionalism of all the Park staff have been the driving force for this unique achievement.
Following the addition of the Djéké Triangle in 2023, the Park now covers a total of 4,334 km2. A protected area of global importance, Noubalé-Ndoki National Park harbors most notably large populations of mammals, including emblematic species of forest elephants, chimpanzees, western lowland gorillas and bongos, as well as a diversity of reptiles, birds, insects. The Park also boasts a rich flora, with century-old mahogany and large-diameter trees crucial for carbon capture. Conservation science has consistently served as a key tool for gathering the data and information needed to steer the effective management of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. For the past two decades, large mammals have been monitored across the landscape every five years by foot surveys on line transects. The Ndoki-Likouala survey is one of the largest, best resourced and most informative monitoring program on the continent. Thanks to these regular surveys, populations of iconic species are known to be stable, with around 3,200 forest elephants, around 2,200 western lowland gorillas and around 3,000 chimpanzees living in the Park.
Visit the new website - https://ndoki.org