Conservation Education

Not only do the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation (DSWF) work across multiple conservation projects worldwide involved in conservation education in schools and communities but we also offer free virtual wildlife talks to schools in the UK. These talks are key stage appropriate and aim to inform and encourage children to protect the world's biodiversity and inspire them to become the environmental leaders of tomorrow.

We believe it’s vital to teach concern and compassion for wildlife and our planet from an early age and it is our aim to bring conservation issues into schools wherever they are.

Community outreach in areas neighbouring wildlife habitats is also vitally important in providing communities with sustainable sources of income, health care and education which in turn decreases human wildlife conflict, bush meat trade and poaching.

In Zambia Covid-19 sadly dramatically impacted our ground-based conservation partners’ community outreach programmes. Due to national school closures and an enforced restriction on movements and public gatherings, this project has unfortunately been unable to fulfil many of its core objectives for this period. Despite these unforeseen operational challenges since April 2020, the programme has been able to:

• Provide 5 women’s empowerment groups with manual sewing-machines and donations of fabric and elastic as well as training 160 women to make and sell re-usable protective cloth facemasks.
• Deliver weekly conservation awareness to 75,000 households, including vulnerable farming communities via two community radio stations
• Continue to pay the salary of the Shanagoma School teacher, providing valuable household income to a Ranger family.
• Develop GRI’s Conservation Club curriculum in preparation for re-launching the project into 50 primary schools in 2021.
• Supported on-going Human Elephant Conflict mitigation projects within Nkala GMA.

Overall, from April to October 2020 the project positively affected 100,000 local communities.

Find out more about our education work here.

Thank you for your support.