Striking a Balance Between Conservation and Development

The African Wildlife Foundation's Heartland Program wins the 2007 Drivers of Change Award

In Africa it is sometimes difficult to balance conservation and development adequately. But a conservation program -- described as innovative and science-based with a landscape-level approach to conservation -- is showing how these two goals can be reached without one compromising the other. The African Wildlife Foundation's Heartland Program includes both conservation and development goals and has made a remarkable difference within the areas it has operated since 1999.

The project totals more than 396,000 km_ and is in East, Central and Southern Africa. Each Heartland is made up of protected and unprotected land and includes land owned by the relevant governments, communities and private landowners.

The Heartlands Program is this year's winner of the Drivers of Change Award in the Civil Society category. The judges were impressed with how the project has driven change in conservation and poverty alleviation for the past eight years.

The judges found that the project successfully achieved the "joining together of communities, NGOs and government sectors in the effort to bring both environmental and human needs on to one platform ... The initiative and work that is achieved by the projects of the African Wildlife Foundation are not only of high quality, but are sustainable enough to benefit all parties involved."

The program uses a holistic approach to balance conservation of natural resources and development to improve local livelihoods by getting communities directly involved in the co-management and sustainable use of the resources with which they live. Intervention strategies undertaken by the African Wildlife Foundation include "improved land and habitat conservation, support for conservation business ventures, undertaking applied research and species conservation, support for training and capacity building and, where necessary, policy and legislation work".

Jimmiel Mandima, the director of the African Wildlife Foundation, Zambezi, is quick to share the success of the project with its partners. "All the work we do is with the help of many partners -- the credit for what we achieve is shared communally by individuals, governments, businesses and everyone else who works with us," he says.

Mandima says the Heartlands Program came about as a result of the African Wildlife Foundation's mission: "At first our focus was mainly on leadership development, training and capacity building, but we were always building up to this."

The program hinges on five strategic pillars designed in the context of the Southern African Development Community's economic and development vision. The first of these is land and habitat conservation, which addresses land tenure issues. It documents the connection between ecological and socio-economic perspectives, especially considering issues on functionality across the boundaries of Southern Africa.

The second looks at species conservation and entails disseminating to communities, and their leaders, a clear understanding of the science that governs the survival and viability of individual key species.

In the third pillar, conservation enterprise, communities consider business opportunities based on natural resources they might be able to use. These are developed, not only to benefit and improve local livelihoods, but also to support conservation through encouraging people to live harmoniously with nature. At present the African Wildlife Foundation is negotiating one such project on the Zambezi river system, where the length of the river means resources have to be shared among many groups. A pilot business development is under way.

Training and capacity building, the fourth strategy, recognizes the need for sustainable governance and the training of local community members in leadership skills, policy and legislation interpretation, which might be relevant for natural resource management. To this end trusts in Zambia and associations in Mozambique have been established and facilitated by the African Wildlife Foundation to ensure official recognition as legal entities. These have become conduits for community participation in sensitizing government on policy.

The last strategic pillar centers on facilitation of trans-boundary collaboration and policy dialogue that serves to facilitate regional collaboration on matters of managing shared natural resources.

By Warren Foster. Published in Mail & Guardian October 25, 2007.