e through similarly explosive territory, setting aside old grievances and compelling national interests. If they succeed, KAZA may help lift people out of poverty and protect one of the last functional large-scale ecosystems left on the continent: the Okavango Delta, a massive wetland that waxes and wanes annually as rivers pour off the Angolan highlands, fanning out into the baking Kalahari and drawing some of the region’s most threatened wildlife — black rhino, African wild dog, and hundreds of species of birds.
In just one of KAZA’s parks, Zambia’s Kafue, tourism could grow from less than $5 million annually to almost $50 million in little more than a decade, according to a consultant’s report. That could be multiplied across the conservation area, which contains more than 40 protected areas: national parks, forest and game reserves, and community conservancies.
An elephant drinks at a water hole in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park.
But the project faces daunting obstacles: insufficient funding, conflict between people and wildlife, fear of disease outbreaks among cattle, and a recently reported steep decline in wildlife numbers. Critics are also concerned that the project may end up enriching foreign tourism companies rather than local communities.
Westerners think of parks as pristine, but as one expert puts it, “Wilderness areas with no human impacts do not exist in Africa.” Only well-established national parks, such as Bostwana’s Chobe, have no human inhabitants; fewer still thrive on the traditional model of armed guards and fences. KAZA — not a park but a “transfrontier conservation area”— has a human population perhaps as high as 2.5 million. Over half its land is communally managed, used for subsistence farming or grazing. While the idea of linking parks across borders has been around since 1932, recent developments in southern Africa have created urgency around transfrontier plans, particularly bottlenecks wrought by fencing (required by the EU’s subsidized beef export market), which effectively trapped tens of thousands of elephants in northern Botswana.
“An Africa without fences” is the vision of the Peace Parks Foundation
. Founded in 1997, it has enrolled every country in southern Africa in the effort, raising millions from donor countries, encouraging private investment,
Such peace parks are dismissed by one academic as another ‘grandiose scheme foisted upon Africa.’
and supporting colleges to train wildlife rangers and tourism staff. Progress has not been without pitfalls: The group was vilified for its high-handed, top-down approach as it expanded South Africa’s Kruger National Park into Mozambique. While peace parks are dismissed by one Cape Town academic as another “grandiose scheme... foisted upon Africa,” there are now 10 in the region, with four more in the planning stage, ranging north to Tanzania.
An idea kicking around international circles since the early 1990s, KAZA was self-consciously designed to be a grassroots affair. Early supporters — including Conservation International, the WWF, and the Wildlife Conservation Society — looked to Namibia’s home-grown and highly successful conservancy movement, which had presided over a resurgence in the country’s wildlife, decimated during the long struggle against occupation. At independence, in 1990, Namibians wrote conservation into their constitution, and the fledgling republic soon backed community-based conservation groups — called conservancies — to create jobs.
At the news that a single elephant hunt might be worth $10,000, “word went through communities almost overnight,” says Chris Weaver, director of WWF in Namibia. “Poaching stopped very, very quickly.” Communities eagerly registered to guard, monitor, and manage their wildlife and have reaped benefits from ecotourism, controlled hunting, and sustainable harvesting of wild plants. Popular and effective, 71 conservancies have been registered so far, creating 1,700 full time and 8,000 seasonal jobs and earning roughly $6 million in 2010, with communities investing the money in health clinics an