Togo is a small, narrow country stretching from the Gulf of Guinea to the Sahel, but its ecological diversity punches well above its geographic weight. Sudanese savanna in the north gives way to the forested Atakora highlands in the centre, before descending to the coastal plain and lagoon systems of the south. This mosaic of habitats supports both of West Africa's native pangolin species — the white-bellied pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis) and the giant ground pangolin (Smutsia gigantea) — though both face severe pressure from poaching, habitat loss, and an under-resourced conservation infrastructure.
The white-bellied pangolin is the more commonly encountered of the two species in Togo, occupying forest patches, gallery forests along river systems, and the transitional woodland-savanna zones that characterise much of the country's central region. Its arboreal tendencies make it particularly dependent on intact forest canopy, and surveys conducted in the Fazao-Malfakassa National Park — Togo's largest protected area at approximately 1,920 square kilometres — have confirmed its presence through camera trap records and community interviews.
The giant ground pangolin is rarer and less well documented. Its preference for moist, lowland forest and its largely subterranean lifestyle make detection difficult, and most records from Togo consist of confiscated animals or community accounts rather than systematic scientific surveys. Given the species' broader West African range, which includes confirmed populations in neighbouring Ghana and Benin, it almost certainly persists in suitable habitat in southern Togo, but the true status of this population remains poorly characterised.
Unlike the transnational trafficking networks that dominate headlines about pangolins, the primary driver of pangolin decline in Togo remains local bushmeat hunting. Pangolins are prized as food across the country's rural communities, where bushmeat constitutes a critical source of protein for households with limited access to or income for domestic livestock. The white-bellied pangolin in particular is actively hunted using wire snares, dogs, and night-time torch-hunting — a method exploiting the animal's slow defensive response when caught in light.
Market surveys conducted at bushmeat markets in Lomé, Kpalimé, and Sokodé have periodically recorded pangolin carcasses and scales for sale, though the open display of pangolin products has reportedly decreased following increased enforcement attention in the early 2020s. Whether this reflects reduced offtake or simply more discreet trading is not entirely clear from available data.
Togo's position as a transit country for wildlife trafficking adds a layer of pressure beyond subsistence hunting. Lomé's port and international airport have been identified in multiple trafficking investigations as transit points for pangolin scales moving from West and Central Africa toward East Asian markets, primarily China and Vietnam. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region as a whole lacks consistent enforcement capacity, and Togo's relatively accessible port infrastructure has made it attractive to traffickers.
In 2019, Togolese customs authorities seized approximately 900 kilograms of pangolin scales at Lomé port, one of the larger West African seizures recorded that year. The shipment, concealed among other cargo, was destined for Asia. Investigations by TRAFFIC and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) have highlighted Togo as part of a broader West African trafficking corridor that aggregates pangolin products from across the region before transhipment.
Togo has experienced significant deforestation over the past four decades. Original forest cover, estimated at roughly 900,000 hectares in the 1950s, has declined to well under 100,000 hectares of intact forest by the 2020s — a loss of over 90 percent driven by subsistence agriculture, charcoal production, and commercial cash crop expansion, particularly cocoa and coffee in the Plateaux region. This dramatic habitat loss has fragmented pangolin populations and reduced the prey base — termites and ants — essential to their survival.
Togo is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and all eight pangolin species were uplisted to Appendix I — the highest level of trade restriction — at the 2016 CITES Conference of the Parties (CoP17) in Johannesburg. In domestic law, Togo's Wildlife Code prohibits the hunting, capture, and trade of protected species, and pangolins are included on the national list of protected fauna.
Enforcement, however, remains chronically under-resourced. The Direction des Eaux et Forêts, the government body responsible for wildlife enforcement, operates with limited personnel and equipment across a country of approximately 57,000 square kilometres. Ranger patrols in protected areas are infrequent, and penalties for wildlife crimes, while legally significant, are rarely applied at levels that deter professional traffickers.
Fazao-Malfakassa National Park, established in 1951 and covering the Atakora highlands in central Togo, represents the country's most important formal protected area for pangolin conservation. The park has historically been managed with support from the Swiss Organisation for Development and Cooperation, and camera trap surveys within its boundaries have provided some of the most reliable pangolin occurrence data available for Togo. Strengthening anti-poaching capacity in this park is considered a priority by conservation practitioners working in the sub-region.
Several NGOs operating in Togo have piloted community-based natural resource management approaches that incorporate pangolin monitoring. In the Kara region of northern Togo, village conservation committees have been trained to record pangolin sightings, document snare removal, and report suspicious wildlife trade activity to authorities. Early results from these programmes suggest that community buy-in can be achieved when conservation activities are linked to tangible local benefits such as improved governance over forest resources and alternative livelihood support.
Given the transboundary nature of both pangolin populations and trafficking networks in West Africa, Togo has participated in regional wildlife law enforcement networks including EAGLE (Eco Activists for Governance and Law Enforcement) Network. EAGLE works across francophone West and Central Africa to support wildlife crime prosecutions by embedding legal and investigative expertise alongside national enforcement agencies. Several pangolin trafficking arrests in Togo have resulted from EAGLE-supported investigations, including cases where traffickers were prosecuted under anti-money laundering statutes in addition to wildlife legislation.
Togo suffers from a significant deficit of basic scientific data on its pangolin populations. No systematic national status survey has been published, and population estimates for both white-bellied and giant ground pangolins remain highly uncertain. The following research priorities have been identified by regional conservation networks.
A camera trap survey covering all major remaining forest patches and protected areas would provide the first reliable baseline data on pangolin distribution and relative abundance across Togo. Such a survey, if designed with standardised methodology, would also allow future monitoring to detect population trends — critical information for adaptive management of both protected areas and hunting pressure.
Understanding the structure of pangolin trade within Togo — distinguishing local bushmeat demand from aggregated export supply — is essential for designing effective interventions. Market surveys in major urban centres, combined with interviews with hunters, traders, and enforcement officers, could provide this intelligence at relatively low cost and would inform more targeted enforcement and behaviour change efforts.
Identifying and mapping potential wildlife corridors between Togo's remaining forest patches, and between Togolese habitat and adjacent habitat in Ghana, Benin, and the larger forests of the Guinea forest biodiversity hotspot, would support landscape-level conservation planning. Priority corridor areas could then become targets for community-based protection agreements or payment for ecosystem services schemes.
Togo's pangolins face a combination of challenges that are daunting but not unique in West Africa, and the country benefits from being embedded in a growing regional conservation network with increasing capacity and political will. The most urgent needs are practical: more rangers with better equipment in protected areas, faster prosecution of trafficking cases, and expansion of community monitoring networks into the forest zones most critical for pangolin survival.
Longer-term, the connection between pangolin conservation and rural community wellbeing must be made more concrete and tangible. Where forest protection and pangolin monitoring are linked to benefits that communities can feel — improved access to forest resources, alternative protein sources, ecotourism income, or direct payments — the social contract that sustains conservation becomes self-reinforcing. In a country where government conservation resources will remain limited for the foreseeable future, building this social contract at the community level is not merely a nice addition to standard conservation work. It is the work.