Solutions

Our strategies to secure Africa’s wildlife and wild lands are hands-on, up close, and personal.

Here are some of the ways the CHILDREN CONSERVATIONISTS PROGRAMME provides solutions that balance the needs of people and wildlife:

Enabling conservation-friendly community empowerment.

We understand specific community needs and work closely with members to make sure they get direct benefits from conserving wildlife and protecting natural habitat. While our education outreach programs help locals to reduce human-wildlife conflict, we also implement projects that create a positive impact for the entire community. CCP has helped communities lease their land to develop conservancies or wildlife management areas. We also help farming communities explore sustainable agriculture, growing their income and reducing pressure on living and natural resources.

Building conservation partnerships and spreading awareness across the continent — and the world

Not only do we nurture relationships with rural community leaders, we also represent Africa’s wildlife and wild lands as the continent strives to meet sustainable development goals. We are working closely with the other entities to ensure that conservation is central to progress over the next few decades. Outside the continent, we have launched successful public awareness campaigns in countries with our ambassadors informing consumers about the brutal truths behind the global wildlife trade. We also advocate for governments and protection agencies to ban international trade in wildlife parts like ivory and introduce stiffer penalties for criminals.

Applying research to our conservation strategies.

We match our decades’ worth of experience on the ground with pioneering scientific research to add a new dimension to our work across the continent. GPS collars on priority populations of elephants help us identify which land must be conserved while radio collars on lions allow us to track population trends, seasonal movement patterns, and mortality. Incisive geographical information systems and mapping informs our conservation strategies so even remote landscapes are protected.

Stop the Killing.

Humans are the sole predators of some of the Africa’s most threatened wildlife species.

More elephants and rhinos are dying from poaching than from natural causes or conflict with humans. Their body parts are traded illegally as trophies, traditional medicine, or trinkets on a lucrative black market — but these iconic pachyderms are not the only wildlife species to be slaughtered for human gain. Big cats like the lion and cheetah are killed for their bones; the African wild dog and other large carnivores die at the hands of villagers protecting their livestock; great apes, like chimps, in Central and West Africa, are hunted as bushmeat and their babies traded as pets; pangolins are captured for their scales and meat

Across the continent’s diverse wild lands, management authorities need data-driven solutions to enhance anti-poaching capacity to allow remaining priority populations to recover from previous, and current, crises. Meanwhile, community-level interventions must explore different economic opportunities that secure rather than destroy biodiversity as pressure on natural resources grows with increasing development, infrastructure, and urbanization.

Wildlife habitats must be maintained to reverse population decline.

The rapid decline of Africa’s keystone species over the last few decades is devastating not only to national economies that depend on wildlife tourism but also to ecosystems that provide resources to other species and vital services to growing human populations. As wildlife habitats become increasingly fragmented, securing Africa’s wild lands gives them a fighting chance to survive

Challenges

Wildlife protection authorities need more resources to keep up with poachers.

Commercial poachers are equipped with tracking technology, high-power firearms, and covert transport routes to evade rangers within protected areas. In many cases, their operations rely on intelligence supplied by local informants or corrupt officials. To mitigate this ever-evolving threat, wildlife authorities require more boots on the ground to deter poachers and enforce wildlife laws. With specialized training and appropriate equipment to navigate the dynamic conservation needs of each landscape, rangers can assess threat levels and monitor wildlife populations.

Protecting biodiversity is often not an urgent concern for developing countries.

Industrial and infrastructural development projects across the African continent jostle for space with protected wildlife areas, threatening vital ecosystems. As human settlement mushrooms around new commercial centers, natural resources — wildlife included — are at risk of turning into commodities for communities living in or close to places rich in biodiversity. Without regulations in place, not only will species numbers plummet due to retaliatory killings, bushmeat trade, and commercial poaching, but their habitats will also deteriorate if water sources are exploited and trees are cut down as fuel.

Solutions

Wildlife rangers and community-based conservation prevents illegal wildlife killings and saves critical habitats for their recovery.

Training and equipping wildlife rangers.

In our priority landscapes, CHILDREN CONSERVATIONISTS PROGRAMME works with wildlife management authorities and local stakeholders to build the capacity of anti-poaching units by equipping rangers and training community scouts. Routine foot patrol missions uproot snares and dismantle poacher camps, seizing poaching or hunting equipment as well as wildlife parts before they reach markets. To tackle illegal activity in buffer zones around protected areas, CCP provides vehicles and bicycles for rangers and village scouts to respond effectively to human-wildlife conflict. With poachers’ drones and helicopters scouring the landscape from above, no place is too obscure for poachers and illegal hunters to hide, nor for at-risk wildlife populations to be attacked.

Ecological monitoring allows rapid response to urgent wildlife threats.

Patrols are vital for weeding out poachers across vast wild landscapes but also for evaluating the most vulnerable targets. A dynamic conservation strategy is informed by accurate data. CCP records and monitors signs of animal presence as well as biodiversity threats using Cyber Tracker GPS software and the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (or SMART). In diverse protected areas, anti-poaching units create a database of valuable information about species population trends, ensuring a systematized method of gathering, recording, and analyzing data. Often, ecological monitoring involves identifying and tracking particular populations by installing GPS-enabled collars on individual animals. This allows rangers to not only protect wildlife, but alert local communities on large carnivore sightings, preventing human-wildlife conflict and livestock predation.

Empowering local communities through conservation.

Human activity within and around protected wildlife areas can be managed sustainably to benefit people, vulnerable species, and the natural resources supporting Africa’s vital ecosystems. CCP engages community members in sustainable conservation-friendly economic activities that protect wildlife and maintain their habitats. Coupled with education initiatives, these local-level interventions reduce the risk of people living alongside wildlife turning into commercial poachers or bushmeat hunters.