The Tale of the People of Amedzofe and the Slippery Frog That Didn’t Slip Away

This is the story of how a tiny, elusive amphibian hidden in the mist-covered forests of Ghana’s Volta Highlands became the catalyst for a community discovering that the future for nature is also a future for people. It is the story of the people of Amedzofe, a slippery frog and Dr Caleb Ofori-Boateng (FFN Award winner 2014).

The main character in peril: Togo slippery frog

For a long time, the Togo slippery frog was more of a rumour than a species. Last recorded in 1980, it had not been seen for so long that scientists filed it away as extinct. These frogs are known to live only in cold, fast-flowing forest streams and waterfalls, in a narrow strip of highland straddling Ghana’s border with Togo. Its slickness, which lets it hold a slippery rock face in a rushing stream, makes it nearly impossible for a human hand to hold onto once it decides to go. These permanently aquatic animals are built precisely for one narrow habitat, which, by definition, means the creature vanishes the moment that habitat is disturbed, which is exactly what nearly happened.

The villain(s): Protagonist under attack

The villain in this story is not a single figure but a slow, ordinary erosion, arriving from every direction at once: forests cleared for farmland and timber, streams disturbed by fishing and other extraction, and the frog itself, long considered a delicacy in local diets, hunted straight out of its shrinking habitat. Over the preceding millennia, hunting, fishing, and habitat loss had already pushed the species to the edge.

But the real villain, the one every conservation project eventually meets, was a communication problem. Telling people to stop eating something they had always eaten, because a species matters to global biodiversity, is not usually enough on its own. As Mr Adjato, church elder and community chairman in Amedzofe, put it, some people were difficult at first and didn’t want to change.

Enter the rescue squad: Herp Conservation Ghana and the people of Amedzofe

Every good superhero has a team that comes to its rescue; in this case, it’s Caleb and the people of Amedzofe. Caleb founded Herp Conservation Ghana back in 2006 (officially registered in 2010), West Africa’s first amphibian-focused conservation organisation, and spent the years that followed doing something less glamorous than fieldwork: building relationships, town by town, with the people of Amedzofe and neighbouring Gbadzeme. The community’s side of that story comes from Mr Adjato, who describes an organisation that arrived without an agenda to impose. Protecting nature, he points out, was never a foreign concept for the church; it sits inside a much older teaching about stewardship rather than destruction. What Herp Conservation Ghana offered wasn’t a new belief but a practical route toward one the community already held. Decisions, he says, run in both directions, and neither side moves without the other’s agreement. Mrs Oras, one of Herp Conservation Ghana’s behaviour change champions, describes what that relationship looked like on the ground: knocking on doors, standing up in front of congregations, speaking to classrooms, wherever people already gathered. Her shorthand for why it mattered ties the whole chain together in one line: protect the forest, and you protect the water; protect the water, and you protect the people.

Mission accomplished: the ripple effect on the people, forest, community and the frogs

The dust has settled, and the scoreboard tells its own story: the hunters have stopped coming, the streams run clearer, and the frog finally has room to breathe.

The canopy walkway, opened in 2022 near Amedzofe’s waterfalls, has become what motorcycle riders Daniel Abusuansah and Mawussi Isaac call a lifeline. Options for young people in the community used to be thin on the ground; now the two of them ferry visitors between sites on motorbikes, and a strong month can bring in about $150, a meaningful supplement on top of whatever else they earn. That income doesn’t stop with them. It fans out to market vendors, restaurant owners, and businesses in towns well beyond Amedzofe itself.

Mrs Afi and Mrs Efua, traders at the market, feel the same chain from their end of it: footfall at the walkway means footfall at their stalls. Neither one talks about conservation in the abstract. For them, it looks like directing traffic at the junction, so visiting cars know where to park, keeping the whole visitor experience running smoothly. Their version of conservation, in other words, is logistics as much as belief, and it’s one more reason the whole community, not just the people who’ve seen the frog, has a stake in protecting it. Mr Adjato ties the material benefits together: a share of the walkway’s earnings has gone into mechanising the community’s boreholes, so water is no longer a daily worry, and more of the community’s young people now have paid work. The visitor mix has also shifted over time. While the earliest tourists were mostly from outside Africa, the walkway now draws a growing share of Ghanaian and other African visitors, curious about what the community has built.

It isn’t only people cashing in on this recovery. The forest itself, which started with the protection of 46 hectares in Amedzofe alone, has grown into the Onepone Endangered Species Refuge, now spanning 8,903 hectares across seven communities. Herp Conservation Ghana has replanted more than 50 hectares of previously degraded land, working alongside farmers through agroforestry rather than against them, so that protecting the forest and earning a living from it stop competing for the same acre. One resident sums up the change in his own community’s rules: hunting and logging are now off-limits inside the conservation area, and with the tree cover filling back in across land that had been stripped bare, the payoff of that restriction is something residents can point to rather than take on faith. Cleaner streams and a recovering canopy are not just good for the view from the walkway. They are the frog’s habitat, restored one hectare at a time, which is a large part of why its population is now, finally, moving in the right direction.

Frogs on side quest

Beyond Amedzofe, Herp Conservation Ghana is racing against time for two other critically endangered frogs found only in the Atewa Forest: the Atewa slippery frog and Afia Birago’s puddle frog, both under growing pressure from mining, logging, and habitat degradation. In 2025, in partnership with the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana and the Zoological Society of London, ten adult Atewa slippery frogs, twenty tadpoles, and twenty Afia Birago’s puddle frogs were transferred to London Zoo to develop husbandry and breeding protocols ahead of a future breeding programme back home. Every frog survived the journey, every tadpole metamorphosed successfully, and the species has since bred at London Zoo for the first time anywhere. Herp Conservation Ghana staff will now undergo specialised amphibian husbandry training before a purpose-built breeding facility opens in Kumasi.

And then they lived happily ever after: A growing population and a five-year plan

The Togo slippery frog is still critically endangered, so “happily ever after” is really “still going and going better.” Since the canopy walkway opened, over 48,000 visitors have come to Amedzofe, now averaging 2,000 a month and making it the most visited site in the Volta Region. The walkway is currently undergoing maintenance ahead of reopening, and Herp Conservation Ghana is preparing new community initiatives to build on.

That momentum now has a shape to it. Herp Conservation Ghana’s 2025–2029 Strategic Plan sets out five pillars for the next chapter: embedding conservation into everyday community decision-making rather than treating it as a distant ideal; growing pro-biodiversity livelihoods like ecotourism, agroforestry, and restoration work so that protecting nature keeps paying its own way; expanding habitat protection and restoration for the Togo slippery frog and other threatened species; building a more resilient, locally rooted organisation, with a five-year goal of raising $5 million and growing the team; and leaning into Ghana’s policy shift toward decentralised, community-led conservation areas. It is, in a sense, a plan to keep doing exactly what worked in Amedzofe, on purpose and at a larger scale.

But the ending that matters most is not really about visitor numbers or acreage. It is that in Amedzofe, protecting the frog and improving people’s lives stopped being two separate projects competing for the same land. They became the same project.

The moral of the story

In the end, the real lesson beneath this tale is that nobody in Amedzofe was mobilised by an argument about biodiversity loss. They were mobilised by a church that recognised its own values in the work, by trees coming back where they’d vanished, by water they no longer had to fight the frog for, by visitors bringing income up a mountain path that used to lead nowhere. The species conservation was real, and it mattered, but it travelled through the community on the back of things the community already valued. That is not a compromise of the conservation agenda. It may be the only way the agenda moves. The frog that slipped through the fingers of extinction did not do it alone. It had a village behind it, and the village had its own reasons for showing up.

Caleb himself has said as much, reflecting on how the project changed him as much as it changed Amedzofe. He set out chasing the science: the surveys, the fieldwork, the race to document a species vanishing before anyone had registered it existed at all. What caught him off guard was watching the community become the actual centre of gravity for the work, not a group he was doing conservation on behalf of, but the reason the conservation held together at all.