WATCH : Training workshop focuses on empowering communities to mitigate human-wildlife conflict in Southern Africa

PROPER land use and involvement of communities in conservation activities is key in mitigating human-wildlife conflict.

This emerged during a training of trainers’ workshop in Victoria Falls, which is being facilitated by the Sustainable Wildlife Management (SMW) Programme on Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence.

The workshop, which is being attended by wildlife field officers working on Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) projects and academics in four of Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area member states (Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe), started on Monday and ends tomorrow.

The Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM) Programme is a major international initiative that seeks to improve wildlife conservation and food security.

It is being implemented by a consortium of organisations that includes FAO, Centre de coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD), Centre for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

In Zimbabwe, the project is being implemented by CIRAD in conjunction with Government and Binga Rural District Council. Binga is one of the districts with high rates of human-wildlife conflict due to its proximity to the Zambezi River and protected wildlife areas.

Its objective is to capacitate the field officers to be able to cascade mitigation skills to communities.

CIRAD-SWM operations manager Dr Sebastien Le Bel said the objective of the programme is to develop a model to give capacity to local communities to reconcile livelihoods and animals.

“Land use planning, if properly implemented, people will not intrude into wildlife corridors. Allocating some space for people and wildlife helps mitigate conflict as people will not get into corridors,” he said.

“We are trying to equip people to invest in preventive measures to reduce cases.”

Dr Le Bel said the programme seeks to help communities living in the landscape to improve livelihoods in communities that share space and resources with wildlife.

Conflict with animals is a big issue hence the need to increase capacity of communities.

“We are training people who are going to train communities and so the workshop aims to find out how best solutions could be promoted at the community level. We cannot achieve sound human-wildlife conflict mitigation strategy focusing on the Hwange area alone,” said Dr Le Bel.

“So, we need a landscape approach. We started the project in Binga after a baseline survey and some of the questions were that human-wildlife conflict was one of the constraints for communities.”

Dr Le Bel said when there is a conflict the level of tolerance between people and wildlife people is very low hence communities should be part and parcel of the solution.

The participants are being taught to use locally available resources in an approach termed “Role play game” where one creates a crime scene situation representing the landscape to help identify species causing problems and the type of tools and intervention to use.

Professor Fabricius Christo from Nelson Mandela University in South Africa who is one of the facilitators, said capacitating the community helps improve the wellness of local people.

“We are here to train people on how to become trainers and promote human-wildlife co-existence and how to use some of the tools, methods and frameworks to alleviate conflict in Africa focusing on Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Namibia,” he said.

“These are field officers working for FAO Sustainable Wildlife Management and the training is meant to learn together to co-create solutions and help teach others to apply these solutions in conservation areas, as well as assess whether their efforts are making progress.”

FAO assistant coordinator for Botswana and Namibia, Mr Farai Mavhiya said the participants are champions of human-wildlife mitigation who will be torchbearers in communities.

The training seeks to teach participants to train others in the use of approaches and methods to, not only mitigate and manage conflict but also promote co-existence between people and wildlife in Southern Africa.

The SWM programme is a major international initiative that seeks to improve wildlife conservation and food security, developing innovative, collaborative and scalable new approaches to conserve wild animals and protect ecosystems, while at the same time improving the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and rural communities who depend on these resources.

The initiative supports the development of a network of community conservancies to improve ecological connectivity and socio-economic sustainability in the Kaza landscape.

-@ncubeleon