It’s time to salute the herder conservationists of Africa. Once, the term would have seemed an oxymoron. The people shepherding livestock across the continent’s great open grasslands have been widely seen as the enemies of its charismatic wild mammals — to be fenced out of protected areas and policed by armed rangers. But that image is outdated.
Today, in hundreds of community-run “conservancies” being established across tens of millions of acres of Africa, herders and their cattle are sharing the unfenced land with elephants, giraffes, wildebeest, and buffalo. Armed only with mobile phones, the herders keep their livestock safe while protecting wildlife — by alerting their fellows to marauding lions and driving off poachers in places that rangers in four-wheel drives rarely venture — and accompany high-rolling tourists who fund their conservation endeavors.
The scale and success of these community conservancies on the only continent where large mammals still run free across huge stretches of land is still a largely untold story. But a new analysis from Maliasili, a Vermont-based NGO dedicated to bolstering local African conservation initiatives, demonstrates for the first time the full extent to which wildlife is often more effectively protected within conservancies than within state-run national parks.
Nearly two-thirds of Kenya’s large mammals are found in communal and private lands, rather than in state-protected areas.
Maliasili found that 16 percent of Kenya’s total land mass is managed by the 230 conservancies that cover more than 22 million acres, an area the size of Indiana. In Namibia the figure is 20 percent and in Zimbabwe 12 percent. Tanzania has an area equivalent to seven Yellowstones managed for wildlife by herders, farmers, and hunter-gatherers.
Wildlife is migrating in ever greater numbers to these areas. In the Maasai Mara, one of the continent’s top magnets for wildlife tourists, straddling the border between Kenya and Tanzania, conservancies cover 25 percent of the ecosystem, but a recent census found that they contain 83 percent of its large mammals.
“Most of Africa’s biodiversity depends on lands owned and managed by local communities,” says Fred Nelson, a veteran of African conservation and the founder and CEO of Maliasili. “These communities are on the front line, and their conservation practices are key to sustaining and restoring healthy ecosystems.”
It is a big change. In the 20th century, conservation in Africa relied on “fences, boots, and guns to keep [out] human disturbance,” says Hussein Tadicha Wario, the son of a pastoralist and the executive director of the Center for Research and Development in Drylands, based in Marsabit, in northern Kenya. But guarded national parks — and the “fortress conservation” ethos that went with them — have made protected areas “a preserve for white foreign tourists, while the communities on whose lands these parks were established were viewed as a threat to their existence.”
Elephants at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, the first conservancy in Kenya established on private land.
Roberto Schmidt / AFP via Getty Images
Now, many African governments are embracing these same local communities as allies in conservation. “To contribute to the global target of protecting 30 percent of lands, freshwaters, and oceans by 2030, the Kenyan Government considers the expansion of the number and area of wildlife conservancies as an important mechanism to achieve these targets,” Munira Anyonge-Bashir, Kenya program director for The Nature Conservancy, and Edwin Wanyonyi, of the Catholic University of East Africa, wrote last summer in a commentary for Frontiers in Conservation Science. “The success of Kenya’s model of free-ranging wildlife is based on allowing as much unhindered movement and distribution of wildlife as possible.”
Conservancies cover a greater area than the country’s national parks, and at any one time nearly two-thirds of the country’s large mammals are found in conservancies and other communal and private lands, rather than in state-protected areas. Some conservancies are private land holdings. The first in Kenya, the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, was established in 1995 by Ian Craig, a descendant of white settlers, who converted the family ranch into a private wildlife sanctuary. He then sought to boost wildlife numbers and tourism revenue by winning over his Indigenous neighbors to establish their own conservancies on communal land, where wildlife protection now goes hand-in-hand with herding livestock. Today, there are 45 of these conservancies, forming a network known as the Northern Rangelands Trust. But each retains its independence, communally controlled and managed by the Maasai and other tribes, like more than 90 percent of Kenya’s conservancies.
Conservancies in the Maasai Mara have revived the local lion population by largely eliminating killings by livestock herders.
Their success is tangible. Maliasili reports that, thanks to tribal stewardship, there were for the first time no slayings of elephants in northern Kenya during 2023. Meanwhile, in the south of the country, the 24 community conservancies in the Maasai Mara maintain the famous 1.3-million-strong wildebeest migration and have revived the local lion population by largely eliminating killings by livestock herders. In recompense for protecting wildlife, the Maasai collectively earn millions of dollars a year from visitors.
In southern Africa, the story is the same. Namibia’s 86 community conservancies cover a fifth of the country and together exceed in area its state-protected parks. Many link up to create wildlife corridors that allow seasonal migrations of animals in search of food and water. This connectivity has helped triple the country’s elephant population to 24,000 in the past 20 years.
These conservancies have also triggered a transformation of rural societies. “Namibia is probably the most inspiring country I have been to in terms of community conservation,” says Nelson. “We’ve seen a whole rural wildlife economy develop around tourism, recreational hunting, and harvesting indigenous plants.”
A Maasai herder watches his cattle in the Mara North Conservancy, a community conservancy in Kenya.
Siegfried Modola / Getty Images
Parts of northern Namibia are within the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, linking Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. More than twice the size of the U.K., it contains 21 national parks, but community lands now make up three-quarters of its total area, according to Maliasili. Its wide-open spaces are home to the world’s largest contiguous population of African elephants and a quarter of the world’s wild dogs. Buffalo and wildebeest numbers are also increasing.
Some conflicts still occur between herders and wildlife, but new initiatives there aim to reduce them. In northern Botswana, community rangers have begun fitting local lions with GPS collars that activate whenever the animals breach a “virtual fence” near communities, delivering real-time predator alerts to the cell phones of nearby farmers and herders.
Once, such alerts might have led to villagers going out to kill the big cats. Now, they enable villagers to keep their livestock and families safe without having to threaten the big cats. After the introduction of the alerts in the CLAWS (for Communities Living Among Wildlife Sustainably) Conservancy, local lion killing fell by almost 90 percent.
Since 2014, Congolese officials have been inviting villages to apply for legal rights to manage surrounding forests.
Not all systems of incentivizing herders and farmers to protect local wildlife work equally well. In the 1980s, the Zimbabwe government of Robert Mugabe created the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE). Its aim was to resolve conflicts between state-protected areas and their rural neighbors by offering communities that protected their wildlife the chance to share revenues from foreign tourists, particularly rich, gun-toting trophy hunters.
This strategy was both heralded and derided. “Save the elephants: Start shooting them,” ran one incredulous headline. But CAMPFIRE today operates across 12 percent of the country and is credited with encouraging the removal of fences in many areas, allowing wildlife to roam freely.
In the early days of CAMPFIRE, government management was minimal, says Ian Scoones, an expert on the country’s complex land politics at the University of Sussex’s Institute of Development Studies. Foreign trophy hunters would often hand out cash directly to local guides and pastoralists after a kill. But the system has since come under the control of local officials and become infected with corruption.
A livestock enclosure keeps cattle safe from lions in the CLAWS Conservancy, a community conservancy in Botswana.
CLAWS Conservancy
“Council officials are in on deals and money gets diverted,” says Scoones. Hunting revenues also fell after an international scandal in 2015, when an American hunter shot a lion called Cecil that was being studied by researchers in a nearby national park. Payouts to communities have since dwindled, and poor farmers are turning again to poaching to supplement their incomes, says Scoones.
The Cecil saga resulted in better enforcement of hunting controls on foreigners, says Moreangels Mbizah, executive director of Harare-based Wildlife Conservation Action, which trains CAMPFIRE officials. And to bolster community engagement in conservation, wider reforms are now in the air. The hunting revenue collection system run by local officials looks set to be replaced by direct community control of wildlife within conservancies similar to those in Namibia. “We support the Namibia model,” says Mbizah. “It puts more control and responsibility in the hands of local communities.”
Most of Africa’s conservancies cover grasslands, which make up 50 percent of its land area and sustain most of its large mammals. But community management is increasingly being adopted in its forests too. Some projects — for instance in Ghana and Liberia — have faltered for want of political and financial support. But there are high hopes for an initiative in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the heart of the world’s second-largest rainforest.
Some question the long-term viability of community conservancies, which often depend on subsidies and tourism income.
Since 2014, the DRC government has been relaxing its central control and encouraging remote villages to apply for legal rights to manage up to nearly 124,000 acres of their surrounding forests, according to agreed plans that combine sustainable harvesting of forest products with protecting those areas. By this fall, 230 villages had licences to exploit more than a million acres of rainforest, according to Alphonse Maindo, the DRC country director of the Netherlands-based NGO Tropenbos International, which keeps a tally. Among the forest species receiving greater protection from these community initiatives are the country’s endemic Grauer’s gorillas and critically endangered forest elephants. Nelson calls this “one of the most significant community conservation reforms in Africa in the past 10 years… a big, big step forward.”
Increasingly, forest conservancies are funding their work through the sale of carbon credits to foreign corporations keen to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. The credits aim to be equivalent to the extra carbon held in forests as a result of the conservancy’s tree protection efforts.
For instance, Zambia’s 80 community forests, covering 3.7 million acres, sell 3 million tons of credits annually. And in northern Tanzania, a social enterprise called Carbon Tanzania has helped the Hadza tribe of hunter-gatherers, known as the “last archers of Africa,” sell credits that fund better protection of their woodlands in an important dispersal area for wildlife from the Serengeti.
Grassland can generate carbon credits, too. In Kenya, the Northern Rangelands Trust sells credits from carbon captured in soils now managed under new livestock grazing regimes, which include systematically rotating animals through pastureland. The 4.7-million-acre project claims to be the world’s largest soil-carbon scheme and earned the 14 conservancies involved $3.9 million in 2023.
Hadza scout Ezekiel Phillipo looks across the Yaeda Valley in Tanzania, site of a community-run carbon offset project.
Roshni Lodhia / Carbon Tanzania
There are naysayers. The Kenya project has been criticized both for strong-arming changes to traditional grazing practices and for its poor quantification of carbon gains.
But besides the ongoing issues over carbon credits, some conservationists question the long-term viability of community conservancies. Many depend heavily on subsidies from international conservation groups and aid agencies, and on revenues from high-rolling tourists. “Some even have TV deals with global channels to profile their animals and the great work they are doing,” notes Scoones. Such finance may prove fickle.
There are social tensions, too. The contrast between the lifestyles of the high-rolling tourists and their hosts is itself socially destabilizing, creating resentments, Scoones says. “You have to wonder how sustainable this is for the longer term,” he says.
But for now, the going remains good. “Community-led models have quietly surpassed fortress conservation in terms of both land area and impact,” says Wanjiku Kinuthia, a senior manager at Maliasili in Kenya. They are places where open, unfenced grasslands are sustained, and wildlife populations are increasing. They generate a large part of the wildlife tourism that makes up 7 percent of Africa’s GDP.
Economic, environmental, and social goals — the three pillars of sustainability — are in rare harmony. And the herder conservationists are in charge.
