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Name a Rhino
Uganda to host first Rhino Naming Ceremony as $11m Name a Rhino conservation campaign reaches milestone.
19 September 2025
This article first appeared in our International Women’s Day 2026 issue of My Green Pod Magazine. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
Main image: Dr Gladys during the translocation of elephants from Mubende to Queen Elizabeth National Park. Photo by Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka
Last year I had the extraordinary privilege of speaking with Dr Gladys Kalema- Zikusoka on my radio show, Our Altered World, broadcast on UK Health Radio.
What struck me most during that interview – which covered her journey, her conservation philosophy and the intersections of public health and wildlife protection – was her unwavering belief that protecting gorillas and people are not separate missions.
In 1996, when Dr Gladys arrived at Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park as the country’s first full-time wildlife veterinarian, the mountain gorilla population had dwindled to around 300. She was 26 years old, armed with a veterinary degree from the Royal Veterinary College in London and confident she could help restore Uganda’s vanished wildlife. What she discovered instead would fundamentally reshape how the world approaches conservation, and reveal that protecting animals begins by protecting the people who share their forests.
That transformative discovery came in 1996, when a debilitating scabies outbreak swept through a habituated gorilla group. ‘The gorillas were losing hair and developing white, scaly skin’, Dr Gladys recalled. She consulted a doctor friend and the answer was stark: scabies is rampant in low-income communities with inadequate healthcare. After treating the outbreak an infant gorilla died, with mites still crawling across its skin.
The lesson crystallised instantly: the gorillas’ illness wasn’t a wildlife crisis, it was a public health crisis. The neighbouring communities, living with limited access to healthcare and sanitation,weren’t enemies of conservation but part of the ecosystem.
‘I realised then that you really need to improve the public health of the people’, Dr Gladys told me; ‘otherwise you’re not going to be able to help the gorillas.’
That insight became the genesis of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), which Dr Gladys co-founded in 2003 with Stephen Rubanga and Lawrence Zikusoka. Today, it stands as a global model for the ‘One Health’ approach: recognising human health, animal health and environmental health are inseparable. It sounds obvious, but at the time it proved revolutionary.
CTPH doesn’t simply treat sick gorillas; it deploys approximately 430 community health workers, called Village Health and Conservation Teams, into homes around Bwindi to improve health and livelihoods while protecting the forest. At least half of these health workers are women, which has helped to create a cohort of female conservation leaders in a field historically dominated by men.
The teams refer sick people to be screened for HIV, scabies and TB. They teach people how to install hand-washing stations outside toilets and cover rubbish heaps to prevent contamination. They offer advice on family planning, a subject that emerged from conversations around community needs. ‘Women were desperate for more control over their bodies’, Dr Gladys explained. ‘They had too many children they didn’t really want. One woman was having 10 children per family.’
The programme was so effective that family-planning rates exceeded Uganda’s national rural average.
The teams expanded their scope even further by teaching sustainable agriculture and soil conservation on steep hillsides. They helped families access 20% of national park fees and $10 from each gorilla permit, which is tourism revenue given to communities by the Uganda Wildlife Authority. They worked with traditional birth attendants to encourage safe hospital births without undermining cultural roles.
Most remarkably, the teams integrated traditional healers into the One Health model; CTPH recognised that while healers excel at relationship-based care, the bedside manner that overworked clinics cannot match, certain diseases like TB and HIV require antibiotics. Now, both systems are working in concert.
An unexpected outcome of the programme was the way it drew women into conservation – a traditionally male-dominated sector – while simultaneously bringing men into public health, where nurses and health workers are predominantly female. ‘Both men and women affect conservation and public health outcomes’, Dr Gladys said. ‘Having gender equity on both sides is really important.’
Dr Gladys’s observation reflects a broader truth: women’s leadership consistently produces more holistic environmental outcomes, yet women remain significantly under-represented in conservation leadership.
Her career reveals both progress and persistent barriers; growing up in Kampala she was obsessed with animals, and considered unusual by a peer group who found her aspirations unrealistic. By 18 she had founded a wildlife club and organised trips to Queen Elizabeth National Park. During those excursions, she witnessed a landscape scarred by civil war and poaching; elephants had fled to the DRC, lions and leopards had vanished. Rather than despair, she resolved to become ‘a vet who can bring back Uganda’s wildlife to its former glory.’
As Uganda’s first wildlife veterinarian Dr Gladys had no predecessors to learn from, yet this limitation became liberating: without an existing playbook, she was free to invent one.
The impact of Dr Gladys’ integrated approach speaks volumes. The mountain gorilla population has grown from approximately 300 in 1996 to over 1,000 by 2018, with approximately 460 in Uganda’s Bwindi subpopulation and over 600 across the Virunga Massif. In recognition of this rare conservation success story, the IUCN downlisted mountain gorillas from Critically Endangered to Endangered in 2018.
Community transformation runs equally deep. Dr Gladys shared the story of an elderly silverback named Ruhondeza who became very frail and settled on community land. Rather than viewing him as a crop-destroying threat, locals protected him; when he died they came to pay their respects. ‘They had learned to coexist with the gorillas and really care’, she recalls. The economic reality reinforces this shift: with Bwindi gorilla tourism accounting for 60% of Uganda Wildlife Authority revenue, former poachers now work as rangers and trackers, earning sustainable livelihoods protecting wildlife rather than killing it.
During Covid-19, Dr Gladys co-authored a policy brief promoting responsible gorilla tourism, advocating for masks and physical distance. Uganda’s government readily agreed. Now, mask-wearing and respectful distance remain standard practice, a habit CTPH hopes to sustain indefinitely.
CTPH is adapting its model to other Ugandan habitats and expanding into the DRC, where eastern lowland gorilla populations are declining. Nigeria has also expressed interest.
Rather than establishing expensive offices everywhere, Dr Gladys builds partnerships with local organisations to adapt the model using a more sustainable, locally rooted approach. With only 10 African countries harbouring gorillas and 21 harbouring great apes, the potential is enormous.
Yet scaling faces genuine barriers; governments must embrace an approach that disrupts the traditional separation between health and conservation sectors, while donors must look beyond funding single sectors exclusively. It requires finding partners willing to think in an interdisciplinary way.
‘The communities are always the easiest to convince’, Dr Gladys told me. They live simultaneously with disease, wildlife conflict and climate impacts; they grasp the interconnection instinctively.
This year’s International Women’s Day theme, ‘Accelerate Action’, reflects an urgent truth: at current progress rates, gender parity won’t arrive until 2158. Yet women’s leadership is essential for climate action. Women represent the majority of people displaced by climate change, yet hold minority status in environmental decision-making.
Dr Gladys embodies what accelerated action looks like. She was recognised in the BBC’s ‘100 Women in 2023’, specifically among 28 Climate Pioneers for her One Health approach. She’s a UNEP Champion of the Earth and an Edinburgh Medal recipient.
Yet these accolades pale beside the tangible results of her work: a growing gorilla population, rural communities with improved health and economic opportunity, women empowered as conservation leaders and a model demonstrating that climate action, conservation and public health reinforce rather than compete with each other.
Dr Gladys’ goal is to grow gorilla awareness alongside an understanding that conservation doesn’t require choosing between human wellbeing and wildlife protection. She points to 300 landowners willing to sell property for gorilla habitat expansion. Most compellingly, she emphasises young people.
CTPH works with schools to build a generation of conservationists – some may eventually become parliament members – which is the kind of systemic change that transcends any single initiative.
This 30-year journey distils to a simple yet radical principle: ‘You can’t address human health alone or animal health or ecosystem health because each affects the others. You have to address them all together.’
In a world fractured by institutional silos, Dr Gladys’ integrated vision demonstrates an alternative style of leadership. This International Women’s Day, she is a perfect example of how one person’s refusal to accept existing boundaries can reshape an entire field. She shows us that saving endangered species isn’t primarily a wildlife problem, it’s a human problem. And when women lead, we find solutions that benefit everyone.
Uganda to host first Rhino Naming Ceremony as $11m Name a Rhino conservation campaign reaches milestone.
Uganda’s economy is benefiting from a tourism sector rooted in conservation and peace.
Following Hemingway’s adventures on our family trip to Uganda.
