THEY USED TO HUNT THE WILDLIFE. NOW THE PHOTOS PAY BETTER.
About 800 villagers across nine Borneo villages get paid for verified photos, video and audio of wildlife. Two villages have since banned hunting themselves.
THEY USED TO HUNT THE WILDLIFE.
In West Kalimantan, a program called KehatiKu pays villagers for proof that wildlife is alive: photos, video and audio, submitted and then checked by experts before money changes hands. About 800 participants across nine villages take part, and the primary source reports roughly 200,000 verified observations a year.
WHAT HAPPENED
The mechanism is almost aggressively simple. A living animal, documented and verified, is worth money to the household that documented it — so wildlife becomes an asset rather than a meal or a nuisance. In February 2026, the village of Nanga Embaloh voluntarily moved toward a hunting ban, on the reasoning that the animals were now worth more to the community alive. Fresh AFP reporting on Sep. 17, 2026 says two participating villages have introduced hunting bans, that submissions have passed 350,000 with about half validated and paid, and that funding is in place through 2028. That last number is the load-bearing one: the incentive only holds as long as somebody keeps funding the payments.
WHY THIS IS HOPESLOP
Most conservation asks people to absorb a cost for a benefit somebody else collects. This one pays the people who live with the animals, for the animals being there — and the villages did the rest of the work themselves.
ORIGINAL SOURCEBorneo FuturesRead the original report