Towards sustainable wildlife management. An in-depth study for the promotion of community conservancies in Zambia and Zimbabwe

Zambia and Zimbabwe, with Angola, Botswana and Namibia, constitute the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KaZa-TFCA), which is the largest transfrontier conservation area in the world (520 000 km²), and whose key objective is to join fragmented wildlife habitats to form an interconnected mosaic of protected areas and transboundary wildlife corridors. In this region, wildlife populations have declined over the past three decades, mainly due to poaching and loss of habitat. In this TFCA, the Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM) Programme aims to address these challenges by promoting the model of community conservancy (CC) to diversify income-generating activities and supply a well-balanced source of wild and domestic protein. In Zimbabwe, the SWM project in KaZa supports the emerging project of Mucheni CC encompassing three wards of Binga District, in Matabeleland North Province. In Zambia, the target implementation sites are the Simalaha and Inyasemu CC, located in Southern Zambia. The SWM Programme is an initiative of the Organization of the African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS) funded by the European Union and co-financed by the French Facility for Global Environment (FFEM) and the French Development Agency (AFD). This seven-year programme (2017–2024) is being implemented in 15 OACPS member countries by a consortium of partners including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Centre for International Cooperation in Agricultural Research for Development (CIRAD), the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).