- In July, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a review of human rights standards in conservation-related aid grants.
- The GAO is an independent, nonpartisan agency attached to the U.S. Congress. The House Committee on Natural Resources asked it to review aid funding in the wake of a scandal over human rights abuses in the Congo Basin.
- The review looked at grants given out by the U.S. State Department, USAID, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conservationists in Africa, and included site visits to projects in Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- The final report highlighted weaknesses in monitoring and self-reporting requirements for grantees and said there was a risk of abuses going unnoticed by U.S. government agencies.
U.S. government agencies responsible for handing out conservation grants overseas still aren’t doing enough to protect human rights, according to an internal review. The review was commissioned by the U.S. Congress in the wake of an outcry over a 2019 Buzzfeed News report on conservation-related human rights abuses in the Congo Basin. The story led to hearings on U.S. taxpayer support for wildlife rangers who had committed abuses.
It’s the second on the subject by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan agency tasked with auditing government operations upon congressional request. In 2020, the GAO published a review of initial steps taken to address the scandal by USAID, the State Department, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) — the three agencies that give out conservation-related aid grants overseas.
Investigators working for the GAO reviewed 19 of those grants that were active between 2020 and 2022. Along with a document review, they visited project sites in Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Among the organizations whose grants were assessed was the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Jane Goodall Institute, African Parks Network, the Virunga Foundation, and the Frankfort Zoological Society.
In July, the GAO published its findings.
The report said that since 2020 USAID, the State Department and USFWS had “taken steps to enhance human rights protection mechanisms,” but it described gaps in monitoring requirements that could lead to abuses going unaddressed by the three agencies.
“Without ensuring partners provide monitoring updates and notify agencies of abuse allegations in a timely manner, agencies may be unaware of abuses, or of whether social safeguards are working as intended to protect Indigenous Peoples or other vulnerable populations,” the GAO said in its report.
In one case, the GAO said that it discovered a sexual abuse allegation brought against a ranger at Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of Congo from June 2022. The State Department had not been not aware of the allegation’s existence, despite being a major funder of the organization that employed the ranger. The GAO described the oversight as evidence that the State Department was not actively monitoring human rights issues connected to taxpayer funding for conservation.
It said that after the GAO raised the matter with State Department officials, they asked the grantee to proactively report abuse allegations in the future.
The report described some steps taken by the three agencies as encouraging. USAID, for example, published a guide on human rights-sensitive trainings for wildlife rangers in 2022. The agency also now has “Protected Area Social Safeguards” standards that include requirements for those trainings, community consultation, and grievance mechanisms that locals can access if something goes wrong. USAID now expects its partners to write social safeguards plans based on those guidelines, and to alert it to human rights allegations if they are brought.
But the GAO cited cases in which USAID grantees submitted their safeguard plans long after they’d already begun to spend project funds awarded to them. In Tanzania, one US-based conservation group delayed sending its plan for 21 months past the start date of a USAID-financed project that included support for communities to protect wildlife.
The group eventually submitted a draft plan for the project in June 2023. Just a month later, a village forest guard who had received some training through the project shot and killed an unarmed pastoralist while on patrol with government rangers. Project staff told GAO researchers they “did not understand the plan was required” until it had already begun activities under the grant.
In an email to Mongabay, USAID acknowledged the shooting incident. But a spokesperson said it had taken place during a patrol that was not directly funded by the grant, and stated that USAID “does not support the use of arms by Village Forest Guards.”
The GAO depicted USAID’s human rights approach as the most stringent of the three agencies. Some of the agency’s grants specifically require its partners to regularly file progress reports on their social safeguard implementation — including the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) at Salonga National Park in the DRC, where many of the events described by Buzzfeed took place.
But overall, the report said all three agencies had gaps in their human rights practices. None of the four awards disbursed by the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) and reviewed by the GAO, for example, included ongoing monitoring requirements for grantees.
“If it’s not clear to the implementing partners that this is what the agencies are looking for and that they’re going to follow up and monitor them and check into what’s being done, then it’s just not going to happen,” said Kimberly Gianopoulos, a managing director at the GAO and one of the report’s authors.
Many of the grants analyzed in the report support conservation projects in areas where there are documented histories of human rights abuses. They include protected areas in the DRC, the Central African Republic, Tanzania, and the Republic of Congo — many of which have seen conservation-related conflicts with Indigenous groups in recent years.
The report suggested that despite the backlash caused by the WWF scandal, U.S. aid agencies still aren’t asking the right questions of their partners.
John Knox, a former U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and the environment and a member of the expert panel that WWF hired to review Buzzfeed’s allegations, told Mongabay in an email that the GAO report showed that those agencies had taken “some steps in the right direction.” But he said it was also evidence that there’s a long way still to go.
“The best approach would be for Congress to set clear, across-the-board human rights standards for conservation funding and to require effective monitoring, along the lines of the bipartisan bill adopted by the U.S. House in 2022,” he said.
The GAO’s report provided a depth of information on U.S. aid flows to conservation organizations. In Africa alone, USAID has 36 active awards for projects that include support for wildlife rangers, totaling nearly $50 million. For its part, the State Department has given out 15 grants in Africa and Asia for wildlife trafficking-related activities, worth more than $25 million.
The report outlined nine recommendations to strengthen U.S. agency support for human rights protection in conservation grants. All three agencies analyzed in the report wrote to the GAO saying they agreed with the recommendations and would take steps to implement them.
In response to a request for comment by Mongabay, a spokesperson for USAID said that it has “zero tolerance for crimes and human rights violations by implementing partners or the people they support, and continuously work[s] to improve systems and oversight for preventing and addressing abuse.”
A U.S. State Department spokesperson told Mongabay that in 2020 it had amended its grant application process to elevate human rights protections.
“After award, social safeguards are assessed through INL program monitoring and oversight,” the spokesperson said. “In addition, vetting is required for all enforcement officials who receive training or assistance through an INL project.”
The agency didn’t comment on the GAO’s discovery of a sexual abuse allegation against a ranger at Odzala-Kokoua. But in a written response published as an appendix to the report, it said that future grants would include stricter requirements for human rights reporting and monitoring.
Fiore Longo of Survival International, the watchdog group that helped break Buzzfeed’s story in 2019, said the GAO report shows there’s still too little pressure on conservation groups to prioritize human rights.
“This level of leniency and lack of concern for the rights of Indigenous peoples would never be tolerated in other sectors,” she wrote in a text message to Mongabay.
Banner image: A ranger with the Uganda Wildlife Authority on patrol in the Queen Elizabeth National Park in November 2023. Image by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.
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