In the past year, the global biodiversity crisis has been forced to the forefront of public consciousness: Human activity has impacted up to 75% of the earth’s land area, as the IPBES has reported, and has the potential to drive up to one million species into extinction. But while most traditional conservation efforts focus on setting aside protected areas—which cover about 15% of the earth’s land and 3% of its oceans—conservationists must also address landscapes where people and natural systems co-exist, where nature is intertwined with human development and social change.
This is particularly crucial in eastern and southern Africa, where the Serengeti, Okavango Delta, and Kalahari—some of the world’s most iconic wildlife ecosystems—are inextricable from growing human populations in rapidly changing societies. Rural livelihoods depend on these forests, fisheries, and rangelands, so effective and lasting conservation strategies must find ways not only to protect wildlife and the environment but also to deliver economic opportunities at local and national scales. In Kenya, for example, up to 65% of all wildlife is found on community and private lands, outside government parks and reserves, and wildlife tourism is a multi-billion dollar industry in the region. As the President of Botswana wrote last year in the Wall Street Journal, “Elephants need to constitute a benefit, not a burden, to those who live side-by-side with them.”
All of this is easier said than done, and conservation is littered with projects that promised to make conservation profitable and beneficial to local communities but struggled to deliver. But since Zimbabwe’s “CAMPFIRE” program in the 1980s—which helped pioneer the idea of generating community-level incentives for wildlife conservation through sustainable and locally managed use—the region has been a source of fertile innovation for conservation efforts around the world. Today, it’s clear that it can be done: A “conservation economy” can create jobs and attract investment while protecting and sustaining the ecological wealth that peoples’ livelihoods depend on. A rising generation of African conservation entrepreneurs—like Ghanaian Fred Swaniker, the founder of African Leadership University—is reframing conservation as a growth sector: “We need to challenge the idea that Africa’s extraordinary biodiversity and wildlife is a diminishing resource that needs to be protected,” as Swaniker put it, calling for transforming conservation by focusing on youth, entrepreneurship, and investment.
In eastern and southern Africa—and indeed much of the world—entrepreneurial conservation is leading the way in four key areas:
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1. Reforming Governance
One of the largest barriers to entrepreneurial conservation and sustainable management can be when wildlife, forests, and fisheries are owned by the state—whether due to historical legacies or political ideology—and opportunities for use by local communities are limited. Weak or absent local property rights can, in turn, limit investment in those resources by businesses and local communities: Without rights to use, manage, or control their wildlife and forests, local communities have little incentive to sustain or protect them, and often prefer alternative land uses such as clearing forests for farms. Granting clear rights over natural resources to local community institutions are a key foundation for more successful conservation approaches, and for unleashing investment in those resources.
Namibia provides one of the best examples of the transformative potential that legal and policy reforms can have. In the 1990s, soon after independence from South Africa’s apartheid regime, the new Namibian government enabled communities to create “conservancies” where they were granted broad rights over wildlife management and utilization. The objective was to return rights over wildlife to rural communities—enabling them to manage and benefit from the wildlife living around them—and since the first conservancies were created in 1998, they have spread to cover more than 16 million hectares, about 20% of Namibia’s land area. This has contributed to the recovery of rare species such as black rhinos, elephants, and lions, which in turn has helped catalyze new investments from tourism, hunting, and indigenous plant harvesting in the conservancies. Today more than 80 conservancies generate around $10 million annually, resulting in over $60 million in net income for Namibia’s national economy.
More recently, Zambia took a similar step toward establishing local rights and incentives for stewardship of its extensive forests and woodlands: a 2015 national forests law that enables local communities to secure management rights over forests on customary lands and earn income from forest products such as timber, mushrooms, and forest carbon. This legal regime provides a foundation for social enterprises like BioCarbon Partners (BCP) to invest in community partnerships and forest protection schemes. Since 2015, BCP has helped local communities establish more than one million hectares of community forests in the Luangwa Valley, the country’s most important wildlife area. By improving the management of these forests through community enforcement and protection—such as local rules prohibiting clearing forests and levying fines on illegal timber harvesting—BCP has established this area as one of the world’s largest carbon credit projects. The project will not only generate significant revenue from these forests for local communities, it will prevent the annual loss of about 2.9 million tons of CO2 emissions from forest clearance and degradation.
2. Building Community Capacity
Even when communities can secure rights over their wildlife, forests, and other natural resources, they still need the capacity to serve as effective managers, to enter into business partnerships, and to plan for its long-term stewardship and development. This often means overcoming decades of dispossession and marginalization, as well as building new capabilities to manage natural resources sustainably.
Northern Tanzania, for example, is one of Africa’s richest landscapes for wildlife. But due to a lack of local rights over wildlife and limited local capacity to manage conservation areas and generate tourism business opportunities, communities have long struggled to secure a share of the pie from a wildlife tourism business that generates more than $2 billion annually nationwide.
Today an entrepreneurial local organization called Honeyguide is leading the way in strengthening local capacity to manage community conservation areas (called “Wildlife Management Areas” in Tanzania), often located on the borders of national parks. They help communities recruit and train skilled local managers of their conservation areas, develop professional management systems, improve the marketing of community tourism products, and strengthen partnerships between tourism investors and communities. Their core objective is to enable communities to develop their conservation areas as viable long-term business ventures that earn enough not only to pay for their management costs—such as wildlife protection by community rangers—but also to generate growing returns to community stakeholders.
A model for how this can work is Rendilen Wildlife Management Area, which provides a key dispersal area for the 4,500 elephants that reside in and around Tarangire National Park. Honeyguide has helped the community hire and train a professional manager and rangers for their conservation area, improve their tourism product and marketing, and reduce incursions by elephants into nearby farms, alleviating conflicts between people and wildlife. From 2016 to 2018, income from wildlife tourism increased by 43%, to more than $200,000. With improved local incomes and support for conservation, no elephants have been lost from this area to poaching over the past three years.
3. Brokering New Partnerships
Nature-based businesses usually require two critical parties to come together: rural communities that live alongside and act as long-term stewards of natural resources and businesses that bring capital, market access, and operational expertise. When these parties speak different languages—figuratively or literally—getting them to work together successfully can be challenging, and often requires facilitating new relationships through skilled intermediation.
In Madagascar, for example, the pioneering conservation organization Fanamby works with communities to improve their livelihoods through nature-based businesses such as tourism and high-value agricultural products. By establishing a social enterprise called Sahanala, a cooperative of 11,000 Malagasy farmers is now a major player in the island nation’s booming vanilla trade, brokering sales to major international buyers seeking full traceability in their supply chain. Connecting international buyers to local farmer groups can increase farmer returns dramatically, improve farming practices, and when combined like other sources of income from forest protection such as ecotourism, contribute to reduced pressure on forests and enhanced conservation outcomes.
4. New Financing Models
If conservation ventures want to scale their impact, investment needs to increase rapidly. For this to happen, however, venture financing needs to recognize how expensive and time-consuming it can be to establish businesses based on community-private partnerships. Forging partnerships that value conservation impact, securing the necessary regulatory frameworks, and effectively monitoring conservation outcomes can all increase venture development costs and timelines.
Partnerships for Forests (P4F) has worked to invest in and scale nearly 20 nature-based enterprises in Africa over the past four years, as part of a larger roughly $450 million portfolio, and a key focus of the initiative is bringing in private capital. This initiative is unique globally in that it works to identify and scale private-sector business models that demonstrate a viable revenue stream from forest conservation, seeking to create an investible class of nature-based businesses that can attract private sector investment. As articulated in a recent report from the Food and Land Use Coalition, P4F’s experiences highlight the importance of providing “patient long-term capital”; improving investors’ understanding of conservation and nature-based business models; and better measuring conservation outcomes as a part of the returns that these businesses generate. For example, in setting up a wild forest coffee value chain in Ethiopia, the program had to improve coffee buyer understanding of the value and traceability of this coffee in order to secure higher prices, ensure that value was captured through hard metrics in terms of forest cover protected and improved livelihoods, and provide intermediate bridge financing to various providers to set up a traceability system and a coffee brand in order to enable the value chain to scale.
Accelerating Conservation Entrepreneurship
To face up to today’s unprecedented pressures on the earth’s living systems, conservation efforts around the world urgently need to become more entrepreneurial, more collaborative, and designed to deliver impact at scale. Conservation efforts need to generate wealth for local people from sustainable businesses based on natural products, operating through partnerships with local people who use and manage their lands and environment. Government, business, and entrepreneurial local organizations that can broker new relationships and partnerships all have a critical role to play in enabling such models. Conservation initiatives around the world can draw key lessons, and inspiration, from the models being developed by a rising generation of African conservation entrepreneurs.
Scaling up their work and impact will be key to finding solutions to the biodiversity crisis that deliver results for both people and nature.
Note: This article draws from a symposium on scaling up conservation business models held at the African Leadership University’s Business of Conservation Conference, which took place in Kigali, Rwanda, in September 2019.
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Read more stories by Fred Nelson.