Londile Moyo
Emmanuel Koro Features Correspondent
AT 46, a human being reaches a stage of maturity marked by reflection on achievements and a renewed drive to accomplish even more. Zimbabwe, celebrating 46 years of independence, stands at a similar point in its environmental conservation journey; a nation reflecting on success while preparing for greater challenges ahead.
Zimbabwe’s conservation story offers a powerful lesson, wildlife can transform lives. Through international hunting revenue, elephants, lions, leopards and buffalo have funded schools, clinics, roads and clean drinking water in rural communities.
These investments have produced doctors, engineers, teachers and other professionals, who now contribute to the growth of Zimbabwe’s economy. Notably, some of these professionals have been and are being “poached” by Western countries that oppose international hunting.
This interesting development exposes what critics describe as “hypocrisy” because these countries reject international hunting but like its products (the professionals it is producing). It is hypocrisy to hate the practice (international hunting) but like its products.
Zimbabwe continues to earn significant foreign currency from international hunting. This system is guided by science. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Quota Setting Manual (1997), quotas are designed to ensure that animals are harvested sustainably without reducing populations, preventing environmental degradation and resource shortages.
International hunters pay fees to rural district councils, which then allocate funds to community development projects and conservation efforts, including anti-poaching patrols, hunting communities’ rangers’ salaries and equipment.
Most hunting takes place in wilderness areas bordering national parks, where the majority of Africa’s wildlife is found (Hartley, 2007; Mwathe, 2023). These areas form the backbone of Zimbabwe’s conservation success.
A major turning point came with the introduction of the Communal Areas Management Programme For Indigenous Resources (Campfire) Programme in 1988, following amendments to the Parks and Wildlife Act of 1975. The programme gave rural communities authority over wildlife and direct financial benefits from its conservation.
Before the introduction of Campfire, wildlife was controlled by the state. As animals destroyed crops without compensation, poaching became widespread. In districts such as Guruve and Nyaminyami, poaching was difficult to control.
After the introduction of Campfire, this changed dramatically. Communities began protecting wildlife and reporting offenders. Studies show that poaching declined significantly, while wildlife populations stabilised and in some areas, increased significantly.
The Campfire Programme is widely regarded as a global model of community-based conservation. Its success has inspired similar approaches across Southern Africa and worldwide. At the 2025 Cites CoP20 meeting in Uzbekistan, that country announced plans to adopt the Campfire model, starting in 2026.
Zimbabwe can rightly take pride in this achievement. Once ravaged by poaching, communal lands have become strongholds of conservation. The lesson is clear: where communities benefit, wildlife thrives.
However, Zimbabwe now faces a new challenge, sustaining this success.
The country remains constrained by the international ban on ivory trade under Cites. Despite holding significant stockpiles, Zimbabwe cannot access global markets to fund conservation because of the 36-year ivory trade ban that now seems permanent.
At the 2019 Africa Wildlife Economy Summit in Victoria Falls, President Mnangagwa revealed that Zimbabwe’s stockpiled ivory and rhino horn were valued at over US$600 million, calling for their sale to support conservation. That value and volume has undoubtedly increased significantly since then.
At the same time, conservation funding is under pressure. According to conservation economist Professor Brian Child, photographic tourism alone cannot generate sufficient revenue to sustain conservation of wildlife in national parks not only in Zimbabwe but throughout Africa, particularly in elephant over-populated countries.
As a result, conservation increasingly relies on Government treasury funds paid by taxpayers; resources that are also needed for health, education, roads and other development priorities.
This raises a critical question: what happens when those funds are no longer sufficient?
Without sustainable financing, Zimbabwe risks reaching a tipping point where agriculture and mining (both economically urgent), begin to compete with wildlife for land. In such a scenario, elephants, rhinos, together with other wild animals that do not generate enough revenue to support their own conservation could lose their habitat.
Meanwhile, experts have proposed alternatives. A former Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority official Rowan Martin, has suggested regulated, market-based ivory trade systems, while the Ivory Education Institute has proposed treating ivory as a tradable commodity similar to the way gold is traded under the London Stock Exchange.
These ideas reflect calls for “smart, bold and fresh” legal trade options to unlock the value of wildlife resources and sustain conservation efforts.
Failure to act could in the near future force the Zimbabwe Government to make difficult trade-offs, potentially prioritising immediate human economic needs over long-term elephant conservation. At that point, national parks could face pressure to be converted into agricultural or mining land.
To use the analogy of how a human being ideally develops, Zimbabwe’s environmental and wildlife conservation journey at 46 mirrors that of a mature individual preparing for the next phase of life.
The country has achieved significant success, but the future will depend on its ability to build momentum and adapt to new realities.
For Zimbabwe, the challenge now is to keep wildlife conservation economically sustainable. Without viable income, particularly in the face of the ongoing international ivory and rhino horn trade bans and the rising elephant and rhino conservation costs, elephants and rhinos, together with other wildlife risk becoming a financial burden rather than an asset.
If wildlife cannot pay for its own conservation, mounting costs could force the Government to make difficult land-use option decisions, including options to turn national parks into land for agricultural production and mining. These choices would undoubtedly reverse decades of hard-won progress in protecting wildlife.
Zimbabwe and other elephant overpopulated and rhino-rich Sadc countries burdened with stockpiles of ivory and rhino horn lying untraded because of the almost permanent Cites trade ban, are walking a very dangerous conservation tightrope.
With these resources gathering dust while conservation costs continue to rise, the stakes could not be higher. Experts are increasingly clear: long-term wildlife protection cannot depend on donor aid. The sudden withdrawal of funding by the United States Agency for International Development (USaid) at the end of February 2026; funds that also supported wildlife conservation, has delivered a big warning.
It underscores a hard reality; donor funding is neither reliable nor sustainable as a long-term solution for wildlife conservation and broader socio-economic development.
Trade, not aid, offers the only viable pathway to securing the future of Zimbabwe’s elephants and rhinos before financial pressures push conservation to breaking point.
λ Emmanuel Koro is a Johannesburg-based international award-winning environmental and developmental journalist, who writes independently on environmental and developmental issues
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter