OpEdNews - Page 3 of Article: Kong Six: Mapping the Road to Tayna

Our Congolese conservation insider had warned us that the grant writers, the biologists, the evaluators and the accountants were all the same people—the conservation clique—but we couldn’t believe there was no oversight or accountability.

Kahuzi-Biega and Tayna are two distinct parts of CARPE landscape No. 10, described in the Mwami’s Tale of our series. Was Tayna ever on the CARPE evaluator’s agenda? Does it matter? Kahuzi-Biega was not evaluated either, unreachable by the Weidemann team due to “heavy rains.” Millions of dollars lost in the jungle, and those promised roads never delivered.

Both projects are largely funded by USAID, with money filtered through CARPE, Conservation International, Pfizer Corporation, UGADEC and other “conservation” entities. (8) USAID contributed $5,496,104 to Conservation International over a period of three years through CARPE, and $2,804,449 went to Tayna and the TCCB “University.” (9)

However, Patrick Mehlman’s report says the “total amount of USAID CARPE funding for Conservation International for the reporting period was $4,678,286.” (10) Mehlman’s numbers conflict with numbers in the Weidemann Report. Notably, DFGF-I contributed $131,580 as “match funding,” meaning some sort of trade and not actual dollars, and Pfizer Drug Company donated $425,000 worth of “medicines” through DFGF-I. At Tayna we saw chemical sterilization drugs with the Pfizer label. The U.S. Congressional Gorilla Fund threw another $283,000 into the pork barrel. The Jane Goodall Institute provided leveraged funding of $634,988 from USAID and its own coffers. (11)

Readers of this series will recall that Clare Richardson, CEO of DFGF-I, was the “expert witness” at U.S. government hearings on the Congressional Gorilla Fund.

In another play on numbers, Conservation International repeats the $2.8 million figure, but adds another $1 million from the Global Conservation Fund. Costs for TCCB infrastructure were estimated at $500,000 with labor contributed by “hundreds of villagers.” (12) In our interview with Pierre Kakule at the DFGF-I compound in Goma, Kakule told us that the bricks for the project were made by “orphans.”

Readers need to download the FLASH (FLASH LINK = http://rabbitsliketrumpets.typepad.com/Tayna/index.html) presentation included with this story for a close-up look at the “infrastructure” at the Tayna Center for Conservation Biology. The pile of bricks, manufactured by the orphans, is now overgrown with weeds.

The money trail is huge and complicated, but we would need accountants and whistleblowers from ENRON to sort it out, or maybe the black magic of the Defense Contracts Audit Agency, which has already completed an audit on DFGF-I—the “proprietary” audit that remains classified. (13)

On February 10, 2006 we asked the Jane Goodall Institute about JGI’s work in the Tayna and Kahuzi Biega areas. Africa Program director George Strunden answered (3/3/06) that JGI received $1 million in USAID for eight areas in Eastern DRC. We then asked JGI to clarify programs and levels of JGI funding in the field in Eastern DRC in 2003, 2004 and 2005. After repeated inquiries an email arrived on May 31, 2006. The answers to our questions were non-answers, obtuse and evasive.

“All of our funds go toward our fieldwork,” responded Nona Gandelman of JGI. “It is our only focus in this area. We assess what’s needed to do the job, and then we do it, based upon approved budgets from our funders. Our budgets are targeted to get the job done.”

The current CARPE cycle runs for seven years, and USAID is required by law to do periodic evaluations. Weidemann Associates were hired to evaluate the program under something called RAISE ICQ. “This 5-year funding cycle began on September 29, 2004. The IQC ceiling is $20 million,” says the Weidemann website. (14)

For a part of a $20 million, five-year evaluation pie, Weidemann Associates flew a four-person assessment team to DRC under the USAID RAISE PLUS IQC task order. The team arrived in early October 2005. Three U.S. based members read a bunch of “key” documents and prepared some “key assessment questions” for “key actors” before they landed in… Congo. (15)

The team reportedly interviewed representatives of all U.S.-based CARPE partners, but later decided that 2-4 hour meetings were not sufficient or adequate, and so they e-mailed “key assessment questions” to each partner organization; two CARPE partners did not respond.

The questionnaires make interesting reading. The CARPE partners challenge and openly castigate competing member organizations—a bunch of hungry BINGOs and DINGOs after the same piece of USAID funding.

Hyenas Gathered for the Kill

U.S.-based members of the Weidemann team traveled to Congo and were joined by the fourth member—“a local area specialist”—on October 29, 2005. They spent one week in Kinshasa, and flew to Gabon—with meetings in Libreville and site visits to CARPE Landscape 2. During week three, they flew back to Kinshasa and then to Goma, where they split up “to maximize their resources and time.”

The team leader focused on the Virunga landscape by traveling to Rwanda (Kigali, Ruhengeri, Volcanoes National Park), and then back to the southern region of the Virungas Park in DRC. Other team members flew to Epulu, DRC, to assess “progress” in the Ituri landscape, and then flew to Beni, North Kivu, where they met with commercial loggers and CARPE partners. Returning to Kinshasa they drafted some conclusions and recommendations for CARPE officials. (16)

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