The African Conservation Fund

African Conservation Fund raises funds and awareness for its Nairobi-based partner, the 12-year old African Conservation Centre, and its science and community-based conservation projects. The organization currently has a focus on East Africa, primarily the greater Rift Valley region from southern Ethiopia through Kenya and northern Tanzania. We also support organizations affiliated with the conservation work of African Conservation Centre.

Strategies

The survival of East Africa’s wildlife in the 21st Century and beyond depends largely on how far and how fast community support for conservation builds around national parks and across the rural landscape.

We offer a strategy that works, by investing in the people who live and work with wildlife, primarily nomadic pastoral peoples.

It is no coincidence that over 65% of East Africa’s famous biodiversity exists outside national parks—on pastoralist lands. For millenia they have co-existed with wildlife.

This bio-cultural relationship is inextricable and dynamic, based on sound ecosystem management, and yet it is beginning to crumble due to external pressures, including ex-urban migration of non-pastoral farmers, habitat loss from land subdivision, widespread meat poaching, and cultural disintegration and poverty.  

Together the African Conservation Centre and African Conservation Fund build successful conservation for these communities-in-need in a three-part holistic strategy:

1) Sourcing funds - connecting Western donors with African projects, providing direct financial support for:

• Researchers who are working to find solutions to conservation challenges, as well as data such as GIS, for the best in conservation planning;
• Small grants to communities for their conservation projects, in the same style as such groups as TrickleUp.org and Ecologia.

2) Providing educational opportunities – We do not just give grants and move on. We work with communities to identify their own needs. Education support can include:

• Business skills for establishing and running ecotourism facilities.
• Communications skills for developing compelling stories and selling them to international media and leveraging additional support.
• Marketing skills for improving global access to markets for safaris or locally produced arts and crafts.

3) Creating cultural linkages, regionally and internationally – the keystone of our programs, with communities learning from each other through exchange programs that are supported by education and project funding. Exhanges:

• Foster conservation through “horizontal learning” built on traditional cultural diffusion.
• Allow communities to build not only the skills but also the confidence necessary to create their own institutions and conservation movements, incorporating their own lifeways and traditions.

Our partnership with the African Conservation Centre, with whom we share at least one board member, is vital to success. This partnership gives us an important on-the-ground connection to support projects in East Africa, while our board and staff work in the West to create economic, training, and communications resources for these projects.


Successes

Our strategy works. Success are exponentially expanding conservation of wildlife and landscapes in East Africa.

Please visit our Partners pages for more information about these projects and their successes. 

You can also visit the Success Spotlight box on the Home page, which has revolving content containing current projects. Click here to go right to one of the stories.