Protecting an astounding diversity of species. (Humans include).
Africa is a home to keystone wildlife species that are facing extinction, including the mountain gorilla, Grevy’s zebra, and Ethiopia wolf. To protect populations from further decline, our being on the ground safeguards involve training rangers and using sniffer dogs to stop wildlife traffickers. Wildlife must survive in their natural habitats, so we empower local communities through conservation – friendly development and work with international agencies to protect Africa’s natural resources. Critical to protecting these vital ecosystems are people. Sharing land across the continent, local communities and wildlife often live alongside each other, leading to struggles for space and water. If people and wildlife learn to live together — inside and outside of protected areas – the future for all will thrive.
The survival of Africa’s wildlife depends on its relationship with people.
Whether it is humans poaching wildlife or wildlife attacking people’s livestock, the problem cuts both ways: the needs of people and wildlife are not in harmony. As human populations grow with the development of industry and infrastructure, our programs balance multiple priorities to mitigate the threats facing iconic species and historic wildlife habitats.
The illegal wildlife trade grows increasingly sophisticated.
Anti-poaching initiatives to stop the slaughter of wildlife within Africa’s protected areas have saved some species from further decline. However, to destabilize the international trade that has decimated populations over the last few decades, we need to combat wildlife trafficking and strengthen the prosecution of wildlife crimes in strategic wildlife crime hotspots. Meanwhile, in demand centers where ivory is carved while rhino horn and pangolin scales are wanted as traditional medicine, many consumers are unaware that the products are ineffective and in fact destroying Africa’s valuable ecosystems.
Our strategies to secure Africa’s wildlife and wild lands are hands-on, up close, and personal.
Here are some of the ways the CHILDREN CONSERVATIONISTS PROGRAMME provides solutions that balance the needs of people and wildlife:
Equipping wildlife rangers, deploying sniffer dogs, and training law enforcement officers to stop wildlife crime.
Providing wildlife rangers with anti-poaching equipment and training prevents the killing of wildlife in protected areas, but to disrupt illegal wildlife trade we deploy trained Canine Detection Units along trafficking channels to intercept wildlife contraband. Located at major Boarders and airports in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda., the robust sniffer dog and handler teams stop illegal wildlife products such as ivory, rhino horn, pangolin scales — as well as the smugglers and poachers behind the killing. With additional training in the enforcement of wildlife laws, national agencies ensure these criminals are prosecuted without slipping through legal loopholes.
Enabling conservation-friendly community empowerment.
We understand specific community needs and work closely with members to make sure they get direct benefits from conserving wildlife and protecting natural habitat. While our education outreach programs help locals to reduce human-wildlife conflict, we also implement projects that create a positive impact for the entire community. CCP has helped communities lease their land to develop conservancies or wildlife management areas. We also help farming communities explore sustainable agriculture, growing their income and reducing pressure on living and natural resources.
Building conservation partnerships and spreading awareness across the continent — and the world.
Not only do we nurture relationships with rural community leaders, we also represent Africa’s wildlife and wild lands as the continent strives to meet sustainable development goals. We are working closely with the other entities to ensure that conservation is central to progress over the next few decades. Outside the continent, we have launched successful public awareness campaigns in countries with our ambassadors informing consumers about the brutal truths behind the global wildlife trade. We also advocate for governments and protection agencies to ban international trade in wildlife parts like ivory and introduce stiffer penalties for criminals.
Applying research to our conservation strategies.
We match our decades’ worth of experience on the ground with pioneering scientific research to add a new dimension to our work across the continent. GPS collars on priority populations of elephants help us identify which land must be conserved while radio collars on lions allow us to track population trends, seasonal movement patterns, and mortality. Incisive geographical information systems and mapping informs our conservation strategies so even remote landscapes are protected.
Stop the Killing.
Humans are the sole predators of some of the Africa’s most threatened wildlife species.
More elephants and rhinos are dying from poaching than from natural causes or conflict with humans. Their body parts are traded illegally as trophies, traditional medicine, or trinkets on a lucrative black market — but these iconic pachyderms are not the only wildlife species to be slaughtered for human gain.
Big cats like the lion and cheetah are killed for their bones; the African wild dog and other large carnivores die at the hands of villagers protecting their livestock; great apes, like chimps, in Central and West Africa, are hunted as bushmeat and their babies traded as pets; pangolins are captured for their scales and meat.
Across the continent’s diverse wild lands, management authorities need data-driven solutions to enhance anti-poaching capacity to allow remaining priority populations to recover from previous, and current, crises. Meanwhile, community-level interventions must explore different economic opportunities that secure rather than destroy biodiversity as pressure on natural resources grows with increasing development, infrastructure, and urbanization.
Wildlife habitats must be maintained to reverse population decline.
The rapid decline of Africa’s keystone species over the last few decades is devastating not only to national economies that depend on wildlife tourism but also to ecosystems that provide resources to other species and vital services to growing human populations. As wildlife habitats become increasingly fragmented, securing Africa’s wild lands gives them a fighting chance to survive.
Wildlife protection authorities need more resources to keep up with poachers.
Commercial poachers are equipped with tracking technology, high-power firearms, and covert transport routes to evade rangers within protected areas. In many cases, their operations rely on intelligence supplied by local informants or corrupt officials. To mitigate this ever-evolving threat, wildlife authorities require more boots on the ground to deter poachers and enforce wildlife laws. With specialized training and appropriate equipment to navigate the dynamic conservation needs of each landscape, rangers can assess threat levels and monitor wildlife populations.
Protecting biodiversity is often not an urgent concern for developing countries.
Industrial and infrastructural development projects across the African continent jostle for space with protected wildlife areas, threatening vital ecosystems. As human settlement mushrooms around new commercial centers, natural resources — wildlife included — are at risk of turning into commodities for communities living in or close to places rich in biodiversity. Without regulations in place, not only will species numbers plummet due to retaliatory killings, bushmeat trade, and commercial poaching, but their habitats will also deteriorate if water sources are exploited and trees are cut down as fuel.
Wildlife rangers and community-based conservation prevents illegal wildlife killings and saves critical habitats for their recovery.
Training and equipping wildlife rangers.
In our priority landscapes, CHILDREN CONSERVATIONISTS PROGRAMME works with wildlife management authorities and local stakeholders to build the capacity of anti-poaching units by equipping rangers and training community scouts. Routine foot patrol missions uproot snares and dismantle poacher camps, seizing poaching or hunting equipment as well as wildlife parts before they reach markets. To tackle illegal activity in buffer zones around protected areas, CCP provides vehicles and bicycles for rangers and village scouts to respond effectively to human-wildlife conflict. With poachers’ drones and helicopters scouring the landscape from above, no place is too obscure for poachers and illegal hunters to hide, nor for at-risk wildlife populations to be attacked.
Ecological monitoring allows rapid response to urgent wildlife threats.
Patrols are vital for weeding out poachers across vast wild landscapes but also for evaluating the most vulnerable targets. A dynamic conservation strategy is informed by accurate data. CCP records and monitors signs of animal presence as well as biodiversity threats using Cyber Tracker GPS software and the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (or SMART). In diverse protected areas, anti-poaching units create a database of valuable information about species population trends, ensuring a systematized method of gathering, recording, and analyzing data. Often, ecological monitoring involves identifying and tracking particular populations by installing GPS-enabled collars on individual animals. This allows rangers to not only protect wildlife, but alert local communities on large carnivore sightings, preventing human-wildlife conflict and livestock predation.
Empowering local communities through conservation.
Human activity within and around protected wildlife areas can be managed sustainably to benefit people, vulnerable species, and the natural resources supporting Africa’s vital ecosystems. CCP engages community members in sustainable conservation-friendly economic activities that protect wildlife and maintain their habitats. Coupled with education initiatives, these local-level interventions reduce the risk of people living alongside wildlife turning into commercial poachers or bushmeat hunters.
Stop the trafficking
Illegal wildlife trade networks stretch across countries and continents.
International trade in illicit wildlife products, like ivory and rhino horn, is turning Africa’s iconic species into commodities. The high-tech, multibillion-dollar poaching industry continues to advance with the recent economic boom in demand centers. As retail markets for illegal wildlife products grow, new financial, intelligence-sharing, and transportation avenues emerge. To destabilize this organized transnational trade, CHILDREN CONSERVATIONISTS PROGRAMME works with various stakeholders to impede the movement of smuggled wildlife goods by using sniffer dogs to catch wildlife criminals. We also enhance legal literacy and administration of wildlife legislation to help law enforcement officers to investigate and adjudicate wildlife cases effectively.
Local roots of international wildlife crime support illegal trade networks.
The journey of one elephant tusk from Africa’s wild lands through the black market and into a buyer’s hands is enabled by multiple actors linked across sectors. Local middlemen provide poaching syndicates with supplies, intelligence, guns, and logistics on the ground. This includes organizing the covert exit routes for wildlife contraband — often, it is hidden within a secret compartment of large trucks heading to major cities. When these illegal wildlife products reach the exit point, exporters have already greased the wheels to make sure they reach their destination without detection. With savvy poaching kingpins directing operations from behind the scenes, the syndicates rake in profits from the slaughter of countless animals — a transnational crime that requires high-level planning, intelligence, and greater levels of finance.
Low detection of wildlife trafficking at exit and entry points.
Moving away from traditional means to smuggle wildlife products between African countries and out of the continent, poaching syndicates are finding new trafficking routes to avoid law enforcement officers. They are also changing the form in which illegal wildlife products are transported — rhino horn is sometimes crushed into a powder or processed into beads to get past customs authorities. Meanwhile, limited collaboration between national agencies and across regions creates delays in deploying the appropriate response teams to address traffickers and handle smuggled wildlife products when they are caught.
Wildlife criminals escape through weak legislation and uneven enforcement of laws.
While many African countries have developed legal frameworks to combat criminal activity, poor awareness of wildlife crime itself limits the proper enforcement of wildlife acts. Cases generally require extended periods of concrete investigation, but this process is hampered by a lack of resources and institutional inadequacies. With poor international legal cooperation, inadequate clarity on how to deliver sentences also allows poachers and wildlife traffickers to slip through the cracks.
Our multi-faceted approach to stop wildlife trafficking helps wildlife protection agencies detect illegal items and streamlines the prosecution of offenders across the continent.
Deploying sniffer dogs to intercept smuggled wildlife products.
CCP’s Canines for Conservation program trains detection units made up of wildlife rangers and sniffer dogs and deploys them to strategic exit and entry ports. Primed to intercept even the smallest piece of wildlife products concealed in the cleverest ways, the teams are stationed at trafficking hotspots in Rwanda and Uganda. Not only are the canines instrumental in intercepting and deterring offenders from using the routes, they are also a tool for collecting evidence to ensure effective prosecution of wildlife cases.
Streamlining wildlife crime prosecution, law enforcement, and investigation.
Although a reliable network of informants gathering intelligence on the ground allows officials to position their response strategically, concentrated anti-poaching efforts must engage all arms of the criminal justice system. This ensures that wildlife offenders cannot escape their crimes through bribes or legal loopholes. CCP facilitates regional judicial training sessions with magistrates, law enforcement officers, and customs agents to develop legal frameworks for the application of national wildlife laws to individual cases of wildlife crime. Apart from guiding the prosecution process, these Wildlife Judicial and Prosecutorial Assistance Trainings also outline how to handle, preserve, and present material evidence, as well as how to manage wildlife crime scene investigations.
Ensuring canine evidence contributes to convictions.
We train the law enforcement officers in our canine detection units to utilize sniffer dogs at trial to ensure that the success of their recoveries is translated into convictions. The sessions aim to increase the understanding and general knowledge on wildlife law enforcement using conservation canines, while also equipping rangers with general investigative skills during canine searches. With a sound understanding of the legislative and procedural aspects of wildlife cases based on canine detection evidence, a reduction in wildlife crime is possible.