The Banjul Declaration was issued in 1977 by Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara, then President of The Gambia, as a call to action for environmental conservation. It emphasized the urgent need to protect the country’s wildlife and natural habitats in response to rapid deforestation and the decline of biodiversity. This declaration played a significant role in shaping The Gambia’s environmental policies and conservation efforts, inspiring the establishment of protected areas such as Abuko Nature Reserve and Kiang West National Park.

“I signed The Banjul Declaration in 1977 – to complement legislation to protect our flora and fauna. I was doing so perhaps many decades too late to save the lion and Leopard whose numbers had been so dangerously depleted to virtual non-existence. The remaining dozens of them roam the protected ranges of Nykolokoba in Senegal, as they used to do a century ago in upper Gambia. Our last elephant in Kantora was shot dead in 1900’s by a European travelling commissioner

The whole subject of the continuing damage to the environment has always left me with a particular ambivalence in the sense that while we designed programmes and policies for development, much of the growth especially in urbanization and road construction and settlement, threatened the environment. They terribly depleted our forest heritage and animal resources. The disappearance of our virgin forest would also mean the disappearance of our social and cultural civilization and predict the doom of our continued existence as human beings.”

Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara