WCS Fact Sheet for Zambia: Building alliances for conservation, achieving results through good science

Fact sheet #1, 16 November 2003

1. Background

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is an international conservation organization headquartered at the Bronx Zoo in the USA1. WCS is a committed long-term partner to conservation in Zambia and has a twenty year history of pioneering new approaches to conservation through close collaboration with the Zambian Government. Key achievements during this period include the development of a national programme for community-based wildlife management, facilitation of a new Wildlife Act reflecting community role in wildlife management, a national database for game management areas, and the establishment of a college for building rural capacity in natural resource management.

2. Conservation challenges in Zambia

Conservation is never a completed state of work. In the Zambian case, conservation challenges change as expanding human needs evolve new threats and pressures on Zambia?s watersheds, protected areas and its rich biodiversity. The farmer who toils for a granary of food and a chance to earn a little for his family must deal with unfair traders and the flood or drought that will surely come one day. Wildlife, timber and fish are often the currency of survival for households who face these problems. Unfortunately, rates of exploitation often outstrip rates of renewal.

In general, rural livelihood security, particularly household income and family food needs, has declined throughout much of Zambia over the past decade. Contributing factors include drought, lack of livelihood skills to grow sufficient food and diversify income, increased rural populations, inadequate markets to promote legal use of natural resources, investment and trade policies that limit rural communities from participating in the formal sector, and lack of resource ownership rights to encourage improved land use practices. The sum total of these factors, though by no means an exclusive list, represent real challenges for conservation. Without appropriate interventions, the end result on wildlife is a degraded landscape with diminishing wildlife numbers and wildlife habitat.

3. Meeting the challenge, the WCS approach

Conservation in Zambia has lacked innovation and vision to help communities become better custodians of their land and beneficiaries of markets that could alleviate the adverse affects of poverty and hunger on wildlife. WCS adopts a results-oriented approach that is science-based and stakeholder-driven to help meet this challenge. Its technical leadership and funding facilitation support the necessary research to better understand the underlying causes to environmental threats. WCS uses these results to design interventions that community stakeholders can pilot and lead themselves as practical, low-cost solutions. Monitoring the success of these interventions is a major focus for distilling the critical lessons and implementation procedures needed to replicate interventions when proven successful. WCS supports the national community-based resource management college at Nyamaluma, Luangwa Valley, as an important way to help to sustain the replication process. Key allies in this overall approach are the relevant Government Ministries and Departments that add value to conservation through improved policies and Government-sponsored programmes. WCS provides support to this approach under a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Tourism, Environment and Natural Resources and the Zambia Wildlife Authority.

4. WCS staff organization

The WCS head office in Lusaka provides a hub of administrative support for four regional offices that direct field-based activities primarily in Eastern Province with limited programmes in Central and Southern Provinces. Primary services provided by the Lusaka hub include accounts, procurement, communication and public relations. All field-based activities fall under designated projects led by project supervisors who are coordinated by a Project Manager. Field-based results become the ?cutting-edge? of conservation-related policy needs and programme development facilitated by a Programme Coordinator. Additional support staff based in Lusaka include a GIS-datamanager, a policy specialist, and two civil society advocacy specialists. The Country Director provides overall programme leadership for WCS activities, which currently maintain a staff of over 70.

5. Cross-cutting synergies define WCS interventions

Responding to livelihood needs that represent potential threats to wildlife often require synergies with such fields as livestock husbandry, agriculture and forest management. WCS has pioneered such cross-cutting synergies to enhance conservation outside protected areas by offering rural people a way to balance their livelihood needs with potential legal benefits from wildlife. Examples include:

• Poacher/hunter transformation: WCS offers alternative livelihood training and market/input support to local poachers identified by community leaders. Over 90 poachers have voluntarily surrendered firearms through this programme and are now practicing more rewarding ways to earn income than poaching, contributing to an annual saving of over 1800 wild animals.
• Linking food security to wildlife: WCS supports better farming practices for over 10,000 households with a history of food shortages due to poor farming skills. Many of these households relied on wildlife snaring to exchange game meat for maize when food stocks ran low. In three years, with support from World Food Programme, 67% of these households are now food secure and have voluntarily surrendered over 12,000 snares, saving over 2500 wild animals annually from this fate.
• Poultry production support: Households in Luangwa Valley lose significant income and access to protein nutrition from the high loss of chickens due to NewCastles disease and predation. WCS set up a programme for communities to purchase vaccines at cost and learn new husbandry skills. In 2003 over 9500 chickens were vaccinated and over 30 poultry producer groups adopted protective enclosures against predation. Increased poultry production is reducing the need to poach wildlife.?

6. Community Trading Centres ? a model that unifies WCS interventions and partners

Wildlife conservation outside national parks is most successful when solutions target a landscape scale approach that influences how the vast majority of households contribute to wildlife production. WCS has consolidated its interventions for achieving such results through a market-driven model, called Community Trading Centres or CTC. The model is a network of producer depots that offer low-cost, high-value transaction opportunities for households who organize themselves as producer groups and comply to land use practices that increase the production of key natural resources in their respective areas. A regional trading centre facilitates the transfer of skills and inputs and promotes fair trade deals on behalf of producer groups. To date WCS has formed over 400 producer groups, 11 depots, and one regional trading centre in Lundazi. Producer groups register themselves with the trading centre and their respective Community Resource Boards, who are local wildlife management authorities. Each group agrees to a set of by-laws that require all group members to support community land use plans that prohibit the use of snares or wasteful burning or clearing of forest resources. CTC is constituted as a Limited Company with 40% shares allocated to participating communities. As a not-for-profit business partner, WCS holds a 52% share and will divest its majority interest as communities meet specified benchmarks for improving conservation results and rural livelihoods. In 2003, the CTC grossed over $50,000 from sales in rice, groundnuts, honey and poultry. In 2004, the CTC will diversify into community-based tourism, processed products and contracted services to safari operators.
With its growing geographic impact on natural resources, rural livelihoods, and environmental-friendly trade practices, the model has co-opted key partners committed to its success, including World Food Programme, Food and Agricultural Organization, Conservation Farming Unit, agro-business interests, District Council authorities, Canadian High Commission and safari operators in the area.

Charity Navigator reviews over 100,000 non-profit organizations in the USA and ranks WCS as among the top ten for cost-effectiveness and transparency of donated funds.

Wildlife Conservation Society is legally registered in Zambia as the Foundation for the Conservation of Wildlife. Email: wcslusak@coppernet.zm (WCS office), wcszam@coppernet.zm (Country Director)