Two of the five 2023 Rolex Awards for Enterprise winners are from Africa, and both are working to improve lives – one in conservation, one in providing water. LORRAINE KEARNEY sits down with them.
Inza Koné is a softly spoken man, diffident. He sits quietly, listening intently to the voices around him. And then he speaks, his words carefully chosen; perhaps as much for the language barrier as for his measured conversation.
Inza is from Côte d’Ivoire and is the country’s first primatologist. He has spent almost 20 years working in Tanoé‐Ehy, one of West Africa’s last primary rainforests and the home of animals and plants found nowhere else in the world. For his work in the environment he is one of the five 2023 laureates of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, which form part of the brand’s Perpetual Planet Initiative.
The laureates are global pioneers who improve lives while protecting the planet for future generations.
The awards were set up in 1976 to mark the 50th anniversary of the world’s first waterproof wristwatch, the Oyster. Through the initiative, the company supports people running innovative projects that improve our knowledge of the world, protect the environment, help preserve habitats and species, and improve human well‐being.
Inza’s chosen profession had a poignant start. He was a shy child, he says, and on a visit to his father’s village he was given a baby baboon to be his friend. He loved his friend, but “when he was growing, the baboon was becoming aggressive. And so it was really difficult to handle him.” Eventually, his baboon had to be killed. This trauma prompted Inza to learn about the behaviour of animals, particularly primates. “It’s about community empowerment for the conservation of four of the most endangered primates of West Africa,” he says about his project.
Côte d’Ivoire has the highest level of biodiversity in West Africa, but human activity, such as illegal logging, poaching and pollution, has left only 2% of its primary forests intact. Inza set up a conservation programme with 11 communities living in Tanoé‐Ehy and in 2021 the forest was officially declared a community‐managed nature reserve. It is now collectively managed and owned by the communities “to preserve their common heritage”, Inza explains. In doing this, he has taken into account “traditional social organisation, values, aspirations, know‐how, and so on”.
Just how biodiverse is this vast swampy forest in the furthest south‐eastern corner of Côte d’Ivoire? Tanoé‐Ehy contains at least 45 endemic species of plants and animals. “In these 11000ha of swampy forest we have some of the most endangered species of monkey in West Africa,” he says. That includes the possibly extinct Miss Waldron’s red colobus, which has not been scientifically documented since 1978 – but they know it’s there.
“Tanoé‐Ehy is a very, very important forest for primate conservation in West Africa,” continues Inza. He has been researching its critically endangered species and creating a model for conservation that unites humans and wildlife so they can live together in harmony. He provides technical support and training in environmental monitoring techniques such as drone surveys, eDNA sampling and camera‐trap monitoring.
His team works with the 11 communities to find alternative and sustainable livelihoods such as cassava farming. They have also planted an educational botanical garden in each village, are growing natural fences that separate farmland from forest, and have planted more than 10000 native trees to reforest the land around the villages.
It is critical to include the local communities. For part of their livelihoods they depend on the forest through fishing in the rivers and lagoons, and on non‐timber forest products for food, medicine and construction. “Culturally, it is also important to these communities because there are sacred rivers inside the forest,” adds Inza. “And they have sacred bonds to some of the monkey species of the forest.”
Conserving the forest is also important in the fight against climate change because as a swampy forest it sequestrates carbon. Knowing this drives Inza forward and he aims to scale up his project, including into neighbouring Ghana (the forest cuts across the border), and plans to formally set up a transborder conservation area.
The award, he says, brings a “feeling of pride that symbolises a kind of personal achievement. [It] also symbolises what can be achieved with engagement, innovation and collaboration. It spurs you to continue because it shows you are on the right track”.
As an aside, the African Primatological Society was created in 2017 and Inza is one of the drivers of the organisation. Its third congress takes place in September in Port Shepstone.
ACROSS THE CONTINENT, just under the Horn of Africa, Kenyan Beth Koigi brings water to her country’s dry north‐west, home of the Turkana people. Slight and unassuming, she packs an outsize punch, first disarming you with a wide, joyful smile.
Beth is a Rolex laureate for applied technology. Having grown up in a farming community in a lush, fertile – and very wet – region of Kenya, she was surprised, as she ventured further afield, that not all of Kenya was green. And so she set to work getting water, a resource she had taken for granted as a child, to people who need it.
Working with Canadian environmental scientist Anastasia Kaschenko and Oxford economist Clare Sewell, in 2017 Beth co‐founded Majik Water, a social enterprise that installs atmospheric water generators (AWGs) in off‐grid communities.
The atmosphere contains six times more water than all of the world’s rivers combined. Solar powered, the AWGs work like this: a fan pulls in air and passes it over a cold surface, and water droplets condense on the surface. At heart, it’s dehumidification. The water is then filtered and essential minerals such as calcium and magnesium are added to make it drinkable. Even at just 30% humidity, the AWGs can collect enough water for people to drink.
In a measure of their success, Majik Water has already deployed 20 high‐volume and 10 small‐scale machines that produce more than 200 000 litres of water a month, serving more than 1 900 people.
“Our largest device can produce 500 litres of water a day,” says Beth. The company works with solar power companies and installs systems in schools and hospitals.
The work she has been doing in this field since 2014 grew out of her social sciences studies at university. “I was doing a lot of community health programmes and one of the parts of community health is water access … 80% of diagnosed diseases are waterborne. [With our system] the water we get from the atmosphere is basically distilled. You get potable, clean, uncontaminated water.”
She started by setting up a basic filtration system in her university residence to clear silt from the drinking water, based on the tried and tested methods her mother used. “It’s quite a hopeless situation to be without water. So I wanted to create a decentralised water source. Even if you don’t have water for anything else … you can at least get drinking water.” Her solution, she says modestly, was already there in nature.
In deserts and semi‐deserts “a lot of animals are dependent on air‐to‐water technology [as are] some communities”. Some plants use it, and insects, too. Her team found about four communities that had been using such technology for generations.
Winning the award, Beth says, was “a huge validation for us” that would hopefully open doors to more partners, which are crucial to the success of Majik Water. “This award is going to give us visibility [to grow] such kinds of collaboration”, one of which she hopes will be with the World Food Programme to provide the fresh water for hydroponic farming.
Her next step is setting up ‘water kiosks’ in one of the largest refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma Refugee Camp, and in Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement in Turkana.
Creating a future where people can adapt is a key part of Beth’s work, and no resource is needed more than clean water. V