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Kennedy Mavhumashava
When the Community Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (Campfire) programme was piloted at Mahenye in Chipinge, Manicaland Province in 1982 and expanded to two other districts seven years later, it was held as a revolutionary ecological conservation, grassroots empowerment and development strategy.
Empowerment was achieved because local communities were put in charge of the management, protection and extraction of value from their natural resources, chiefly wildlife. It was felt that such empowerment would help conserve the resource as rural communities would, for instance, not poach animals they collectively owned or destroy the environment their animals relied on.
In the end, the income their community earned when tourists visited to see game or to hunt it, would be used at local level to initiate projects to alleviate poverty, build social and economic infrastructure like schools, roads, and clinics, establish irrigation schemes, and drill and equip boreholes or construct dams.
In 1989, the Campfire initiative was extended to Nyaminyami and Guruve districts in Mashonaland West and Mashonaland Central respectively amid positive reviews from the academia, governments and development agencies.
Soon many other districts adjoining game parks in Matabeleland North, Matabeleland South, Masvingo and Mashonaland West joined Campfire, then known as Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources before its name change at the start of the fast track land reform programme. Encouraged by the success of the conservation and empowerment approach, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique implemented their own equivalents.
However, community development planners might need to relook at the Campfire model with a view to ensuring it responds to emerging challenges such as poaching, low revenues accruing to communities, a weakening grassroots appeal and the drying up of donor support which drove the initiative.
Mrs Tholakele Vundla (37) of Vukuzenzele Village in Chief Siphoso’s area in Tsholotsho expects Campfire to drill a better borehole for the community, help her pay fees for her three children and provide her family with food.
“We don’t know what Campfire has done for us,” she said. “We are going hungry and don’t have money to pay fees because my husband died in 2008. I am told Campfire money was used to build Pathalika Hall but it does not benefit us. We are hungry and some of us are on medication.
We are advised that we take drugs after a meal, but because we eat only once a day, or not at all, it means the drugs cannot help.”
Of her six children, one is in Grade Two and has fees paid by the Basic Education Assistance Module. Two are in Grades Four and Five and were recently sent home as their fees have not been paid since last year.
Her other child dropped out of Pelandaba Primary School at Grade Seven. Ashen-faced because of chronic hunger and sickness, the widowed mother of six said her Grade Two child is the luckiest in the family as a non-governmental organisation has a feeding programme at Pelandaba Primary School.
“For the rest of us, we just sleep hungry,” she said.
As a coping mechanism they have halved their food portions.
“We normally prepare isitshwala in a size four pot for the 12 of us. Now we are down to size two. There is no food here. It was bad from January because the little we had planted was eaten by elephants. But Campfire must stop that (destruction of villagers’ crops) happening,” she said.
Problem-animal control to prevent animals killing people or destroying their crops, houses and other social infrastructure is a key component of Campfire. However, in recent years the control system has virtually collapsed, angering communities who lose their food, lives and livelihoods to elephants and lions.
Campfire is based on the assumption that locals can only be involved successfully in the long term conservation of natural resources around them if they themselves can make decisions about how to utilise the resources and if they stand to benefit economically from their exploitation.
It has three primary goals – to improve the economic situation of locals by developing new sources of income based on resource exploitation, conserve biodiversity and to enable people to participate in political decisions revolving around their welfare and that of their wildlife.
Communities, local authorities and the Campfire Association share proceeds based on an agreed formula. Communities get 60 percent.
Campfire generates the bulk of its revenue, about 90 percent from trophy hunting. Sale of live animals, tourism and harvesting of natural resources like riversand, timber and amacimbi also contributes.
Fifty eight out of 60 districts in the country are part of the Campfire programme. The Campfire Association, the national body that oversees the management of the project says Ward Wildlife Committees that administer Campfire at community level do not always devolve cash to households, but prefer to allocate the funds to community projects.
Mrs Methelia Maphosa (52) thinks a more direct approach could help. She said because of persistent hunger, she and her family are always weak.
Mrs Maphosa, who is also a widow, has grown-up children but is looking after two school-going grandchildren.
“If we say we have Campfire yet we drink water from a dam because our borehole yields salty water and we live in constant fear of animal attacks, it does not mean anything. Are these not some of the things that Campfire must address?”
At least 110 elephants have died since August in Hwange National Park after a well-connected poaching syndicate, working with impoverished villagers in Chief Siphoso’s area in Tsholotsho, laced salt pans and water sources with cyanide. The active participation of villagers in Tsholotsho and other areas across the country has brought to question the efficacy of the Campfire concept as a conservation and empowerment strategy.
On a recent visit to Tsholotsho, the Minister of Environment, Water and Climate, Cde Saviour Kasukuwere agreed with villagers that the Campfire model must be refined to meet new challenges. He said villagers tend to be hostile to wildlife if they do not benefit from it. Such hostility often manifests itself in poaching.
At a meeting between ministers and villagers to urge the latter to hand over cyanide to police, Mr John Vumile Dube, a local said Campfire has been working well until 2009 when the association allegedly stopped remitting money from hunts to Tsholotsho Rural District Council.
Around that time, he said rangers stopped their patrols to curb poaching and animals invading people’s fields from Hwange National Park. Resultantly, elephants and predators like lions and hyenas now roam in villages where they have destroyed crops in Ward One and Seven since 2009, precipitating food shortage.
“Campfire is not as beneficial as it used to be,” said head of Vukuzenzele Village, Mr Owen Dladla. “It helped build Pelandaba Primary School, sink a borehole nearby but now there is nothing. It must buy food for us because elephants are destroying our crops. We have no clean water as well.”
His wife, Ms Atalia Sibanda is particularly unhappy that her husband, because of the general food insecurity in the village and his status as a traditional leader, is frequently called upon to provide food to more people than his own family.
“They see us as better off, and also that he is the village head,” she said. “So they seek food from us but we are also struggling. Whenever we buy maize meal, I make it a point I allocate small portions to his two brothers next door. These I know he has to fend for them. That excludes other people who look upon their leader for help.”
The complaints Tsholotsho villagers are raising with regard to lack of benefits from Campfire and the prevalence of human-animal conflict are legitimate, says academic and conservation expert Professor Karl Vorlaufer in a recent paper “CAMPFIRE – the political ecology of poverty alleviation, wildlife utilisation and biodiversity conservation in Zimbabwe.”
Prof Vorlaufer argues that Campfire revenues are generally modest. As such they have been unable to alleviate the serious poverty of the programme’s target group, the rural population.
“Because the populations of game are large and growing, the conflicts between humans and wildlife are increasing; the modest Campfire revenue cannot compensate for the costs of the large amount of damage caused by wildlife,” he argues.
From 2010 to last year, Tsholotsho District has received about $580 000 from its 60 percent allocation from Campfire proceeds.
Campfire Association director, Mr Charles Jonga, defended the record of the organisation saying people must not expect direct, individual benefits. Rather, it targets the whole community. In Tsholotsho South, he said the challenge was with the safari operator there who, before losing the right to hunt in the area recently, had failed to consistently remit Campfire proceeds to the community since 1992.
He however, said the illegal western economic sanctions have been the primary cause of the challenges the initiative is facing nationwide. From 1982 to around 2003, he said, Campfire was 100 percent donor-funded, but the support was stopped when the European Union and America started imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe.
“We did well from the 1980s until about 2003,” he said. “The lack of progress in recent years is because we have not received any donor support. This has been a big challenge because natural resources management thrives on the notion that resources are not just national assets but global assets as well.
We used to get a lot of support from USAID but we don’t get it anymore. We used to get support in terms of uniforms for anti-poaching teams, ammunition and so on but there is nothing now. For example, Tsholotsho had two vehicles for problem-animal control which went out of service in 2009.
“There are reports that Namibia is doing wonders with its own Campfire which they copied from us, but it is doing so well simply because it is 100 percent funded by donors. When you remove that support, you have a problem.”
From 1989 to 1994, USAID supported four districts – Tsholotsho, Hwange, Bulilima, Mangwe and Binga. In 1995, the US agency broadened the support to all Campfire districts, but stopped in 2003. The Ford Foundation and Kellogg Foundation also helped from 2004 to 2008.
To survive in the circumstances, Campfire has devised a more inward-looking approach.
“Campfire has since formed a trust to provide a long term mechanism of supporting its activities, but its capacity to mobilise resources is still limited,” said Mr Jonga.
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