Late one afternoon in November 2013, by a quiet water hole in Namibia’s Mudumu National Park, Robin Naidoo snagged an impromptu lesson in wildlife tracking. Naidoo, a senior conservation scientist at WWF, was there to tag members of several wildlife species whose movements he’d been studying. The park ranger accompanying him, a man named Matambo Singwangwa, is a member of the San (or Bushmen), an indigenous group famous for their ability to follow even the subtlest animal trails.
“I asked him for a little lesson,” Naidoo says. “So we wandered around the water hole and looked at all the different tracks. The stories he could [tell] about what the wildlife were doing, simply based on some marks in the ground, were just outstanding.”
Naidoo, a friendly Canadian with dark curly hair and a PhD in conservation biology and environmental economics, specializes in a different sort of tracking. He uses quantitative analyses to evaluate a wide range of conservation issues, and for the past five years he’s focused more and more of those analyses on one environmental initiative in Namibia. It was his ability to uncover new ways of seeing—like the lesson at the water hole—that led him to an important discovery about the health implications of the communal conservancy program there.
A Proven Model
Namibia’s communal conservancy program is a national initiative that aims to conserve the country’s valuable natural capital while reducing poverty among its largely rural population. At the program’s core are communal conservancies—customary landholdings that local communities have agreed to manage sustainably. In return, Naidoo explains, the communities “benefit from wildlife and other natural resources on their lands in a variety of ways.”
That wildlife includes some of the continent’s most iconic species. The ochre- and rust-colored deserts and savannas characterizing the bulk of Namibia’s lands, along with a swath of wetter, more tropical veld and woodlands in the northeast, are home to cheetahs, black rhinos, lions, Hartmann’s mountain zebras, oryx, elephants and black-faced impalas.
When Namibia won independence from South Africa in 1990, many of those species were close to disappearing. Rampant poaching, fueled by drought, human-wildlife conflict and several other factors, had ravaged animal populations throughout the country. To reverse that decline, the new government mandated environmental conservation in its constitution—the first country in Africa to do so—and several years later, it passed legislation establishing the conservancy program.
“We started with just four conservancies [in 1998],” Maxi Pia Louis says. Louis is the director and secretariat coordinator of the Namibian Association of Community Based Natural Resource Management Support Organizations, or NACSO—a coalition of local nongovernmental organizations, like WWF in Namibia, the University of Namibia and individual partners that support the conservancies in every facet of their work. She has a warm, high-pitched voice and a no-nonsense manner.
Initially the program drew little interest, Louis says. But that changed once income started flowing into the first conservancies through ecotourism lodges, sustainable hunting ventures, craft marketing and other activities. By December 2003, 25 additional communities had registered as communal conservancies; at the end of 2013, the total had jumped to 79, encompassing more than 230,000 people and covering almost 20% of the country.
In tandem with the program’s growth, animal populations surged throughout Namibia, and some species began fanning across regions where they’d long been absent. (Lions, for example, have returned to the beaches of Skeleton Coast National Park, where they’re known to feast on scavenged whales and seals.)
Today the program’s main challenge is keeping up with its own success, Louis says with a laugh. “Everybody wants to have a conservancy now.”
