Hugh Doulton is the Technical Director of Dahari, he has lived in Anjouan for almost seven years. His responsibilities include the strategic development of the NGO, the search for funding, and the management of partnerships at the international level. In this article he returns to the importance of these international relations, and details the collaboration between Dahari and its partners, in particular in Mayotte, Madagascar and Reunion.  

“At Dahari we place a lot of importance on the development of our international collaborations and partnerships. We believe that it is a mixture of knowledge, skills and experience both Comorian and foreign that will develop the NGO and help us achieve our objectives. More broadly, we find that there is a lack of actors committed to development and conservation in the Comoros, and we hope to reduce our isolation and that of the country by assisting other institutions to establish themselves.

The research and development of these links is one of my key roles as Technical Director of Dahari. Even before the officialization of Dahari in February 2013, I began to transit between the islands of the Western Indian Ocean, and even further afield, to represent Dahari in various meetings, to build or strengthen collaborations for NGO.

I have given presentations on Dahari at conferences and workshops in Mayotte, Reunion Island, South Africa, and the United States. I learned lessons about Dahari's development through meetings with similar NGOs in Madagascar and East Africa. I provided the NGO's leaflet to hundreds of potential partners or donors. And everywhere I found real interest in our activities in the Comoros.

But what concrete results do we have from these investments?

From the Big Sister Island Madagascar we are developing an integrated coastal management project in Bimbini with the British NGO Blue Ventures, we have benefited from financial support from the Swiss Embassy for a market gardening project, and several partner institutions from the island are represented in our sponsorship committee . More collaborations are in the offing following my last visit this month, and we hope to be able to announce some good news soon.

A the meeting we have developed a strong collaboration with the International Center for Agricultural Research for Development (CIRAD), a key partner for Dahari. We are representatives in the Comoros for a regional project on livestock improvement called ARChE_Net, and we hope to soon benefit with CIRAD from funding from the General Council of Réunion for a project focused on improving agricultural interventions in the NGO in all areas. We also benefit from support from the Réunion Satellite Station, which provides us with satellite images and expertise to support field work, spatial planning and monitoring-evaluation.

Without also forgetting the United Kingdom, where the bases of Dahari were created ten years ago with the development of a research project by five English students. We continue to benefit from the close support of our historic key partners Bristol Zoological Society and Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in the areas of conservation and institutional development, both technical and financial. More recently, we have confirmed the support of researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Kent for our ecological research and the institutional development of the NGO; we hope to develop these links further in the years to come.

We are proud to have the support of these internationally recognized institutions, which are a guarantee for Dahari, and hope to soon confirm other partnerships that are being developed. Thanks to the key international partnerships of the ECDD Project – Bristol Zoological Society, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, Agronomes et Vétérinaires Sans Frontières – we have been able to introduce innovations in rural development and natural resource management in the Comoros that have proven themselves and are in progress. reproduction courses by our local partners. We intend to continue this dynamic with these new committed partners. »