Nyungwe National Park is a high-altitude mountainous rainforest in south-western of Rwanda and it is rich in Biodiversity especially in endemic species. As Rwanda is a very small populated country it is facing conflicts between wild animals and the surrounding local communities like crop raiding. In this month, I was involved with community conservation field work at Chimpanzee Conservation Project at Nyungwe National Park and I have observed that wild animals crop raiding is threat to the food security and the sustainable development to the local population surrounding Nyunwe National Park. From the observation I have conducted and discussion with local population, animals who used to come out the forest to raid are chimpanzees, baboons and velvets monkey.

Chimpanzee comes out to look for beer honey and eat bananas it takes a whole honey house and goes with it. It is very aggressive one person can?t arrest it there is a day a chimp has cut an arm of an old man when trying to stop it stealing a honey house. And when it comes to banana plantation a chimp destroys the whole plantation.

For baboons, they raid all crops bananas, beans, sweet potatoes, potatoes, maize, avocadoes, cassava, fruits, colcases, yams and others. They eat everything of a crop even a planted seeds in the soil, they dig and get them. And once a plant survived from the seeding period they come back in its maturity with fruits, and they raid again. So what rate could give to a farm to harvest a crop from his or her farm?

The velvets? monkey raid only fruits. It is really a scaring and you can ask yourself how the population survives. The local population surrounding Nyungwe National Park has adopted the approach of combining the field guard, each family has its hour for guarding certains fields area to the wild animals from the park and I think it is a good initiative.

As a youth friend of environment, conservationist, green sustainable development and a reader of this article, do you think that the wildlife crop raiding would be solved in this area surrounding Nyungwe National Park? If yes, what are approaches do you suggest to be introduced.