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Sidebar: Partners in Africa
Go Deeper
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Fifteen years doesn’t give Makui and his team much time to pioneer a land-lease program in Kitengela. But he is anticipating a little additional support from the African Wildlife Foundation and its new collaborator, The Nature Conservancy. The Conservancy, which has been working on the legal and political intricacies of private land protections for more than 50 years, is now taking lessons learned to Africa—and hoping to learn a few lessons itself in the process. This year the two groups have already raised $45,000 to help support Makui’s lease program.
“Our conservation goals give us a road map of what mission success looks like, and working in Africa is certainly part of that,” says M. Sanjayan, a lead scientist for the Conservancy who is kicking off the new Africa program. In late 2006 the
Conservancy entered into an agreement with the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) whereby the two groups will combine forces to protect crucial corridors and habitat throughout Africa.
But this new program is shaping up to be something different than almost anything the Conservancy has done before. “Africa is going to be conserved by Africans; there is no need for us to reinvent the wheel,” says Sanjayan, who now lives in Montana but grew up in Sierra Leone, Sudan and Kenya. “Working through on-the-ground partners will allow us to make rapid conservation gains without wasting a lot of time and money.” Instead of spending money on new staff and office space, the program will infuse $5 million directly into key partnership initiatives over the next two years.
The first of those new partners, AWF, was founded 45 years ago by conservation-minded members of the U.S.-based Washington Safari Club who saw the handwriting on the endangered-wildlife wall. Since then AWF has evolved into the one of the largest nonprofit organizations focused solely on conservation in Africa, a respected conservation group now staffed almost entirely by Africans.
Today AWF has projects in 11 countries across the continent. They range from a joint venture with Starbucks that’s transforming farmers on Mount Kenya into environmentally conscious coffee growers to a wildlife conservation program on a Tanzanian ranch that aims to protect grasslands by helping local Masai raise healthier—and fewer—cattle.
“The opportunities right now to secure huge areas for conservation and the future are immense,” says Patrick Bergin, president and CEO of AWF. “Private land conservation has had an amazing impact in North America. My feeling is that this conservation approach has great potential in Africa—the surface has not even been scratched.”
The Conservancy’s relationship with AWF started long before any talk of a partnership. In the summer of 2000, two Conservancy scientists took up temporary residence in Nairobi. Susan Anderson, who runs the Conservancy’s northern Mexico program, and husband Peter Warren, the Conservancy’s grasslands conservation guru, set about quietly assisting AWF in developing a science-based conservation strategy.
Through that process, AWF incorporated conservation planning into its program to protect eight African “heartlands” ranging from 2,800 to 39,000 square miles. And because the heartlands were identified in concert with Conservancy scientific parameters, there was no need to re-create an Africa strategy when the new partnership kicked off last September.
“With eight massive heartland areas to protect, we’ve got an ambitious agenda,” says Adam Hen-son, program manager at AWF. “The Conservancy has huge capacity, and we’ve already done the groundwork. It’s a natural win-win.”
“We don’t want to go in full force, buying up huge amounts of land,” says Andrew Soles, who helped write the business plan for the Conservancy’s Africa program. “We want to work with local partners to create long-lasting conservation programs that are sensitive to the needs of local people.”
“The Conservancy would love to see several million acres of key East African habitat under conservation easement,” says Sanjayan. That’s considered off-the-charts visionary thinking in a place where many governments are only just loosening their grips on natural resources.
“Until recently, in parts of Africa virtually all land has been either government- or community- owned,” says Sanjayan “There’s little track record of private land conservation.”
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photos © Frans Lanting/Minden Pictures (Wildebeests and zebras); © Henner Frankenfeld/Redux (Park officials)
