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By Pat Graham
July 21, 2009
The wind was blowing so hard it lifted the sands high in the air, darkening the skies. It reminded me of the Arizona dust storms during monsoon season.
I was driving up to Margie’s and Garth’s place. It serves as their home and office and was designed so the doors could be open even in this weather. It’s a rustic place built by a man who used it as a rehab center for alcohol and drug users.
I’m in the Namib Desert less the 20 kilometers from the coastal town of Swakopmund.
Garth, a biologist, and Margie, an anthropologist, make for an interesting partnership and team. Margie has worked for years with the Himba people in far northwestern Namibia and even published a book rich with photographs of these traditional people.
Garth became concerned early on with the rapid decline in black rhinos from poaching. Together, they became the driving force behind the Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC). The name belies the organic nature of the process they’ve set in motion. It is based on understanding the needs of people and of wildlife and how the two can be brought together.
Working with indigenous people like the Himba, Herero, Damara and San in the northwest Kunene region and the northeast Caprivi region, they and their dedicated staff are bringing to reality something that most organizations can only dream about.
It started as a simple idea to address a crisis. The crisis was the illegal poaching and killing of black rhino, elephants and many other wild animals. In 1982, the black rhino population in the Kunene region dropped to only 60 animals in the southern areas as the poachers pressed from the north. Extinction was a very real possibility. Garth and groups like Save the Rhino Trust knew this trend had to be stopped.
The idea was to “Africanize” sustainability by creating a common vision with twofold benefits:
1) protect natural resources like wildlife through tourism and managed hunting, and 2) use that revenue to create income that would help feed, educate and provide health care for the people living in these arid lands.
The problem was that the local people had no rights to the wildlife and no way to benefit other than to poach. So in the mid-1990s a group of creative minds in the Ministry of Environment helped engineer legislation that gave locals the same rights to manage wildlife and tourism as the white farmers were given several decades earlier. The rights were conveyed to voluntarily assembled and government-approved communal conservancies.
Today, one in eight Namibians lives on a rural communal conservancy. People who may have little or no formal schooling or whose business experience is a herd of 50 goats may be responsible for far more money than they have managed in a lifetime—hiring game guards, balancing finances and enacting management plans.
To sustain this concept, IRDNC developed training courses and support activities. These are not designed to tell the local people what to do, rather to create the conditions that empower and enable them to be successful. As a trainer, that often means allowing decisions to be made that they might not make themselves.
Take for example Tora, one of the oldest and largest conservancies. When revenue started coming in, the conservancy committee made the decision to allocate an equal amount of money that was given directly to each family regardless of size.
Does that seem fair?
Perhaps not to us. But local leaders understood that to overcome distrust in this new system every family needed to see the same benefit. In fact, many doubted they would see any benefit at all. This changed when families started receiving money they could use on whatever they needed.
After a few years the system was modified based on the will of the members. Now when cash is distributed, the allocation recognizes differences in need. Money is also spent on projects that benefit the larger community like creating a new water source, developing a campground to diversify their revenue base, or creating a self-insurance program to compensate landowners whose property or livestock were damaged by lions or elephants.
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment, and the biggest surprise, according to Margie and Garth, is that this simple idea has led to the creation of civil society. Conservancies now have the structure and tools to give voice to rural Namibians in ways that have never happened before.
| « Arizona: Africa Connections | Arizona: Africa Connections...Black Rhino» |
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Pat Graham/TNC (Namib Desert); Photo © Pat Graham/TNC (Local conservancy gathering); Photo © Pat Graham/TNC (Garth and Margie).
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