Community Partnerships

The communities are at the heart of the solution. They own the land and have the property rights on the land. The challenge is that the land in individual parcels is not economically productive in the rangelands bordering national parks. When communities join their individual parcels of land and form a large conservancy unit, it becomes ecologically viable for conservation and can support large populations of wildlife and their habitat requirements. These wildlife populations can then support tourism activities by attracting visitors on safari and nature expeditions at a premium fee since its more exclusive than the typical national parks. This in turn generates revenue that can pay the landowners the cost of not using their land, while creating other livelihood opportunities like employment and support with other community projects like education. The primary objective is to endear the communities to the concept and get them to accept that collectively they stand to earn more long term benefits by not fencing or developing their individual lands and instead forsaking it as a wildlife habitat together with the other parcels of other community members

There must be goodwill and trust between the community and their leadership on one hand and the community and the proponents of the conservancy on the other. The legal framework must be able to support lease arrangements that guarantee the land owners that there is a legal recourse should there be any dispute.

Indigenous communities have regard for wildlife and would take initiative for their conservation as long as there is tangible benefit. The people also support genuine investments based on natural resources that support conservation and give solutions to poverty and environmental degradation.

National laws that support registration of titles and leases are important as they decentralise decision making from the national governments to individual land owners who can freely get into negotiations with the conservancies. This makes it easy to make decisions and empowers the communities to make decisions that affect them