World Gorilla Day

Living social commitment:

Best Rechtsanwälte is proud to support a charity concert to support CTPH, a leading conservation NGO, who work to protect Gorillas in Uganda.

The concert will take place on Saturday the 25th of September at 6 pm at Biodiversum in Remerchen / Luxembourg.

The event, which has been planned and organized by Voice, Art & Social, a nonprofit organization based in Luxembourg, will be a live concert featuring 5 Luxemburgish musical talents George Philippart, Mara van Dyck, Thierry Mersch and the Duo Tamara and Marianne.

Charity Concert | Facebook

About Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH)

CTPH is a grassroots NGO that promotes biodiversity conservation by enabling people, gorillas and livestock to co-exist through improving their health and livelihoods in and around Africa’s protected areas.

CTPH was founded in 2003 after Dr. Gladys Kalema Zikusoka- then working as the first Veterinarian for the Uganda Wildlife Authority- and her team traced a fatal scabies skin disease outbreak in the endangered mountain gorillas of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Southwestern Uganda back to the surrounding communities.  It was evident that a single sector approach could not address the inextricable links between population, Health and Environment (PHE). For this reason, CTPH began implementing an intervention using an integrated multi-sectoral approach to address the challenges related to wildlife conservation, human health and alternative livelihoods to improve health and well-being around Africa’s protected areas.

Urgent Action to curb COVID to people and gorillas

There are 1,063 mountain gorillas and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is home to almost half the population of these endangered apes. We are currently in a critical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Impoverished communities around Bwindi have poor access to health care information and services, leaving them at high risk of COVID-19 infection. Their neighbours – the endangered Mountain Gorillas – being so closely related to humans, are also at high risk of COVID-19 infection when they range in community land. With healthcare facilities already overwhelmed, we need to reduce spread of COVID-19 among local communities, which will in turn reduce the risk of transmission from people to gorillas.

Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) will train community volunteers – Village Health and Conservation Teams (VHCTs) and Village COVID-19 Taskforce committees (including health officials, wildlife managers, local leaders, schools and religious institutions) – to support community surveillance and contact tracing, isolation and shielding of vulnerable people, safely manage home-based care cases, and increase community awareness on prevention and vaccination through peer communication.

Your support will greatly help to ensure the survival of 43{1c502c4e1e1b7ff5687e142ea847928a3a0330004eb49fa220ca63e79f6a7746} of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas, while supporting the health of community members and other local residents. Without urgent action, particularly given the current second wave of COVID-19 being experienced in Uganda, further complicated by Delta variants, COVID-19 will have drastic consequences for Bwindi, its endangered gorillas and surrounding human communities.

Photos by Jo Anne McArthur

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