Community-based Conservation: It Works
Wildlife conservation in Africa used to be a simple affair: fence off an area of land, keep the locals out, and charge foreign visitors to come and see the animals. Simple, but not effective. Excluding local communities from their natural equity tends to increase the practises that work against conservation – namely wildlife poaching, illegal firewood collection and livestock encroachment.
The tide began to turn in the late 1980s, and as conservation authorities began regarding local communities as co-stakeholders in the ecosystem, the benefits rippled across Africa. Healthy black rhino populations in Namibia, for example, are partly a result of local employment in the tourism sector, while in Tanzania, former lion-hunters are now employed as lion-protectors to ensure a balance between traditional grazing rights and wild animals.
Local human capital now makes up the greatest proportion of employment in Africa’s safari industry.
Community-based conservation works. And by establishing a working relationship with both conservation and tourism, local communities then benefit from revenue. It may be capital projects – clean piped water, a primary school, a clinic, better roads – as well as direct jobs (rangers, guides and hospitality staff) and entrepreneurs selling their craft.
Financial empowerment of local communities through commerce also protects traditional crafts & culture.
So far so good. But there’s a difference between supporting local communities through tourism and investing in them for the future. This less-common approach to community-based conservation is ultimately designed to inform and empower the following generations; those youngsters sitting in the newly built school get not just an education but are shown the potential behind conservation and tourism.
Take Zambia, for example. A project dedicated to the conservation of the country’s large carnivores also funds local students up to tertiary level with an emphasis on women training in veterinary science and biological conservation. Big cats and wild dogs are one of the main reasons visitors come to Zambia, and the country is taking steps to make it sustainable.
African wildlife authorities have realised the dollar value of their natural equity & take steps to conserve it.
In Tanzania, a vital wildlife corridor linking Lake Manyara and the Tarangire National Park has been established to safeguard the future movement of wild animals between the two reserves. Donated by the local Maasai community, this corridor was once a scene of deadly human-animal conflict. Now, the education, employment and commercial opportunities afforded by tourism means a local economy grounded on the natural conservation of the corridor.
Wildlife corridors through non-protected areas are essential in the campaign to reduce human-animal conflict.
It all starts with the youngest generations – the school children of Africa – and of course these are the generations least likely to be able to visit wildlife reserves and appreciate what they are being urged to conserve.
You can’t protect what you don’t know; some operators are taking the message to the youngest generations.
That’s changing too: Twende Porini is Swahili for “Let’s Go to the Bush” and it is also the name of a Tanzanian programme which invites children from local communities to stay at safari lodges in the national parks, planting the seed for future conservation.
In Botswana, an Outreach programme aims to bridge the disconnect between local children and their natural environment. Despite living just a few miles away from a reserve, these children have never seen wildlife and now they go on game drives and boat cruises, learning the art of wildlife photography, learning how tourism and conservation work together.
Africa’s future guides, vets & conservationists experience their natural environment & heritage for the first time.
