COMACO Person of the Month

Working on secondment from the Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA), William Banda aka Willy is the Wildlife Specialist for COMACO. His involvement started in 1988 when he worked as a village scouts under the Administrative Management Design (ADMADE) project. He joined Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in 2003 as a Wildlife Specialist and is currently based in Lundazi.

One of Willy’s first assignments was identifying notorious poachers in the COMACO Core Areas for the Poacher Transformation Program (PTP). To date, he has assisted in locating and reforming over 320 poachers, who surrendered their hunting weapons freely to undergo the transformation training. The PTP has become one of the COMACO program’s greatest achievements and over 800 firearms have been recovered.

Willy has been involved in skills training and development of the transformed hunters. He has organised various training workshops in carpentry and vegetable gardening and acted as a mentor to the hunters. Other activities that Willy has been involved in are research studies in illegal game meat trade, collection of various other vital research datasets, and the COMACO solar fencing project.

These and other activities differentiate Willy to the others and WCS is proud to recognize Willy as COMACO person of the month. >> Back to COMACO Person (Previous Months)