Private wildlife conservancies show the way to sustainable tourism in Africa

Despite individual African governments having an essential role in tourism management, private wildlife reserves are proving to be the sector’s driving force. But are conservancies the way to go?

This week, more than 190 countries attending a UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, Canada, committed to protecting 30% of the Earth’s lands, oceans, coastal areas and inland waters in an attempt to conserve global biodiversity.

Africa is regarded as a key pillar in these efforts. And yet, a conservation revolution may already be under way on the continent.

The Great Green Wall for Restoration and Peace is a grand initiative facilitated by the AU to restore savannahs, grasslands and farmlands across Africa — about 100 million hectares worth — and create 10m jobs.

This poster child for African conservation has been touted as transformative — but dig deeper and a more localised transformation is already under way, driven by local, private and community-funded, conservation.

In 2023, 3,000 delegates drawn from close to 100 countries will descend on Kigali for the World Travel and Tourism Council Global Summit, one of the world’s most influential travel and tourism events.

This is the first time the summit will be held in Africa.

Many of those who attend are African tourism and wildlife industry leaders as well as key government representatives.

The event recognises the enormous effort Rwanda put into building its tourism sector, which was almost nonexistent just 20 years ago.

“Rwanda is building its reputation as a must-see destination,” World Travel and Tourism Council president Julia Simpson said.

Famous for its robust tourism and wildlife approach, Rwanda is the only African country with an extensive gorilla conservation programme, the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, and has made this species the centrepiece of its tourism offering, in much the same way that China has done with its pandas.

Though the country’s major successes in the tourism sector are government-led, the underlying privately managed game parks and animal sanctuaries are a booming subsector.

They have significantly complemented government efforts to upscale the industry.

This is not unique to Rwanda, as Africa’s extensive wildlife diversity remains largely untapped.

Private conservancies have surged across Africa in recent years, run and managed by private entities — whether individuals or community-wide initiatives.

The World Wild Fund estimates that Africa — a continent that is home to close to 30% of the world’s wildlife population — has lost nearly 70% of its wildlife population in about 50 years.

According to the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association, KWCA, 65% of Kenya’s wildlife now lives on community and private lands.

“In the Maasai Mara, for example, 15 conservancies protect over 450,000 acres of critical habitat for the great Serengeti-Mara wildebeest migration.

“This has seen the lion population double over the last decade and 3,000 households earn more than $4m (R68m) annually from tourism,” the KWCA said.

African Nature Based Tourism Platform, a platform connecting funders to communities and SMEs in wildlife and tourism, in a series of country reports released in January 2022, demonstrates the value of the subsector in economic development.

In Kenya, private and community-owned conservancies contributed 8.1% of the country’s GDP, supporting more than 1.5-million jobs. The survey report lists 93 privately owned wildlife conservancies, 68 of which are community owned.

Comparative figures are listed for SA, where individuals privately own 71 conservancies, with 21 community owned. These contributed to 6.7% of SA’s economy, channelling more than $22bn (R376bn) besides supporting 1.5-million jobs.

Similar trends could be observed in the case of Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Uganda, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Tanzania in 2019, before the pandemic.

According to Carel Verhoef, a Tanzania-based conservation enthusiast and wildlife film technical director, private wildlife conservancies have different models across Africa.

Kenya’s model is of shared land, Tanzania has converted former hunting blocks into safari areas, and Botswana employs community-based conservation areas.

“The Kenyan conservancy model is such that an agreement is struck between land owners, the Maasai, and the private sector on land management and sharing land use,” Verhoef said.

However, these models are not perfect.

“The model is good for expanding a small protected area... But it is dependent on the tourism sector’s success. That means it is vulnerable to bad business management and global pandemics,” Verhoef said .

Exploitive capitalists could also threaten the approach, because the land under conservation is offered to the highest bidder.

Verhoef believes that for conservation and sustainable tourism to be realised in Africa, the conservation obligation should not be left wholly in the hands of the private sector, where financial success is prioritised over the actual need to conserve.

Human development and herding in conserved areas, among other human activities, continue to limit wildlife conservation, especially on private lands.

Richard Obanda, senior manager at Buteyo Miti Park, a privately owned conservancy in western Kenya, says community involvement is crucial.

“The park today has no funder supporting its operations. We depend on entry fees which can barely support 50% of our operational needs.

“The alternative is to ensure there is as much value added as possible so that the space can serve both the community and us,” he said.

For him, the debate on the place of private conservancies in sustaining the sector, cannot be understated.

“Communities are offered an opportunity to have direct control of the natural resources besides minimising human-wildlife conflicts since such issues are solved more amicably,” he said.

This week's historic agreement envisages $200bn (R3.4-trillion) provided to support biodiversity by 2030, with another $500bn (R8.5-trillion) possible.

Low-income countries are to receive far more than is now provided for efforts to protect nature.

That funding is likely to go some way to fuelling Africa’s fast-growing, localised — and locally-owned — conservation economy. — bird story agency