MEMBER OF THE MONTH

August 2010: AFRICAN WILDLIFE FOUNDATION

The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) is the leading international conservation organization focused solely on Africa. We believe that protecting Africa’s wildlife and wild landscapes is the key to the future prosperity of Africa and its people and for over 45 years we have made it our work to help ensure that Africa’s wild resources endure.

Our Mission:

The AWF, together with the people of Africa works to ensure that the wildlife and wild lands of Africa will endure forever.

Our Partners:

Our History (in brief):

The African Wildlife Leadership Foundation was founded at the height of the African independence movement to help newly independent African nations and people to conserve their own wildlife.

The organisation was then renamed the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) and has played a major role in ensuring the continued existence of some of Africa’s most rare and treasured species, including the elephant, lion, gorilla and rhinoceros. To do so, AWF has invested in African people through training and capacity building in order to improve livelihoods while also conserving wildlife. In 1998, AWF ushered in a new era in conservation with its “African Heartlands Program”.

Empowering the African People:

Who better to protect their land and resources than Africans themselves? Living on the land we strive to protect, Africans are in touch with both its potential and its challenges. They have witnessed the draw of tourists to their land and have come face-to-face with the sometimes destructive consequences of sharing land with Africa’s wildlife.

Empowering Africans to be Africa’s stewards is at the core of our strategy and we begin right here at AWF with approximately 80% of our staff originating from Africa.

A Unique Continent - A Distinctive Conservation Approach:

AWF believes that a continent as unique as Africa requires a unique approach to conservation. It is simply not enough to develop initiatives to protect single species or conserve individual pieces of land. We must look at the whole picture.

In Eastern Africa, AWF partners with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) to promote mixed wildlife / livestock land uses, particularly in highly threatened wildlife corridors such as the Kwakuchinja Corridor between Tarangire and Lake Manyara National Parks in Tanzania and the Kitengela dispersal area outside of Nairobi National Park in Kenya. With their strong technical capacity and solid research base, ILRI has also intermittently acted as a technical advisor to AWF as it works to promote mixed wildlife / livestock as a most viable land use in the rangelands of Eastern Africa.

The African Heartlands - A New Approach to African Wildlife Conservation:

The only way to conserve Africa’s wildlife is to manage Africa’s wild lands. Not small pockets of land, not even national-park-sized swaths of it but vast landscapes that range for hundreds, even thousands of miles.

To do this, we need to involve, educate and equip local people to practice sustainable land management – and reap economic benefits. We need to lay a foundation of painstaking scientific research to understand the landscape, the wildlife, the people and their complex interactions. We need to build an intricate web of laws, policies and practices that bring stakeholders together – from government departments to villages to safari operators, so that lands are managed intelligently for the benefit of all.

All of Africa’s lands sustain life. But certain key landscapes are absolutely essential to conservation due to their unmatched concentrations of wildlife and their potential to sustain viable populations for centuries to come.

AWF has done the hard work of identifying those landscapes. They are the “AWF African Heartlands”. Far larger than any park or reserve, an African Heartland combines national parks and local villages, government lands and private lands into a large, cohesive conservation landscape that often spans international borders.

In an African Heartland, people and wildlife live side by side, and the needs of both are balanced. In an African Heartland, AWF works with stakeholders to design land conservation strategies, protect species through applied research and conservation efforts and empower people through training and economic development.

In AWF’s African Heartlands, the future of Africa – its wildlife, habitat and people will be secured. Visit the following African Heartlands, where AWF's conservation action takes place:

• Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
• Kazungula (Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe)
• Kilimanjaro (Kenya and Tanzania)
• Limpopo (Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe)
• Maasai Steppe (Tanzania)
• Regional Parc W (Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger)
• Samburu (Kenya)
• Virunga (DRC, Rwanda and Uganda)
• Zambezi (Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe)

Our Contacts:

Conservation Centre (Kenya)
African Wildlife Foundation (AWF)
Ngong Road at Miotoni West Road, Karen
P. O. Box 24663 – 00502, Nairobi, Kenya
Tel: +254 20 2710367
Fax: +254 20 2710372
E-mail: africanwildlife@awfke.org

Other contacts in Africa include: Tanzania; South Africa; DRC and Zambia

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