Dr Kalema-Zikusoka, wildlife vet: Saving gorillas
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“We were able to improve the health of the gorillas and people together. What we do is we improve the health and the livelihoods of the local communities. Because as long as people are poor, they're going to keep entering the forest to poach and collect firewood and they're going to end up making the gorillas sick, or picking up diseases from wildlife in the forest.” Myra Anubi speaks to Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, a Ugandan wildlife vet and founder of Conservation Through Public Health, about the approach she developed to help save mountain gorillas from extinction.
When she began her work in 1994, their numbers had fallen to just a few hundred. Not just because of habitat loss and poaching, but because of human diseases.
Rather than focusing only on treating the animals, she realised the solution lay with the people living alongside them. Better health and livelihood opportunities meant less poaching and less need to rely on the forest, reducing the risk of disease and protecting the gorillas.
The Interview brings you conversations with people shaping our world, from all over the world. The best interviews from the BBC, including episodes with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, and Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN. You can listen on the BBC World Service on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 0800 GMT. Or you can listen to The Interview as a podcast, out three times a week on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. Presenter: Myra Anubi Producers: Osman Iqbal Editor: Justine Lang and Damon Rose Get in touch with us on email TheInterview@bbc.co.uk and use the hashtag #TheInterviewBBC on social media.
(Image: Dr Gladys Kalema Zikusoka Credit Kibuuka Mukisa)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.6 | Hello, I'm BBC presenter, Myra Anubi, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service, |
| 0:13.0 | the best conversations coming out of the BBC, people shaping our world from all over the world. |
| 0:20.8 | If you're not a little bit afraid, then you're not paying a... shaping our world from all over the world. |
| 0:25.2 | If you're not a little bit afraid, then you're not paying attention. |
| 0:28.7 | We have never seen a people so united. |
| 0:31.5 | Do not make that boat crossing. Do not make that journey. |
| 0:35.7 | Being born in America, feeling American, having people treat me like I'm not. |
| 0:37.8 | We're more popular than populism. |
| 0:46.3 | For this interview, I speak to Dr. Gladys Kalama Zikuzoka, a Ugandan wildlife vet and the founder of conservation through public health, about an unexpected idea that helped pull |
| 0:51.8 | mountain gorillas back from the brink of extinction. |
| 0:55.7 | When she first encountered the gorillas in the 1990s, there were only a few hundred left. |
| 1:01.2 | They were under threat from habitat loss and poaching, but also from increasing contact with |
| 1:06.4 | human disease. But the solution she developed sits at the intersection of conservation and public health. |
| 1:13.7 | It's built on the simple idea that protecting gorillas depends on improving the lives of the people |
| 1:19.4 | who live alongside them. We don't only focus on the gorillas, we also focus on the people. |
| 1:25.2 | With people, we improve the health of the people |
| 1:27.6 | through community volunteers |
| 1:30.2 | who are based in the villages where these people live. |
| 1:34.2 | They're essentially community health workers |
| 1:36.4 | promoting conservation with public health together. |
| 1:40.6 | And they carry out a lot of behavior change communication on good health and hygiene practices. |
... |
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