Five Calabar students have graduated from a gorilla research scholarship

Six postgraduate students at the University of Calabar have been through a scholarship aimed at the Cross River gorilla, and five of them have graduated. The Guardian Nigeria reported on November 3, 2026, from the project's closing study-committee meeting in Calabar. The Nigerian Conservation Foundation and partners put about 200,000 Canadian dollars into the five-year Community Conservation Graduate Student Scholarship Programme, funded by the Wilder Institute in Canada. The group was one PhD student and five master's students. Funding covered tuition, housing, living costs, and medical care. Students also joined exchanges in Ghana and a conference in Lagos.

Adedamola Ogunseyan, the foundation's director of technical programmes, said the research looked at gender, land-cover change, and environmental damage in the Afi Mountains and the wider gorilla landscape. He described the Cross River gorilla as a subspecies found only in Cross River State and parts of Cameroon. Andrew Macintosh, a senior scientist at the Wilder Institute, said it is too early to know whether the program has changed the gorilla population, and that conservation still needs long monitoring and community work. Blessing Ntamu, who coordinated the project at the university, said one PhD student and four master's students have graduated, and that the remaining master's student is expected to finish before the end of the year. She also pointed to camera documentation of a Cross River gorilla in the wild, described as the first in decades. The university said it will press for the students' recommendations to be considered. The news is this finished round of scholarships and that camera record. It is not a new population count.