Wildlife Conservation Botswana Project #61320

Elephants for Africa's Community Empowerment

by Elephants for Africa

Elephants for Africa's Community Empowerment

Project Report | May 9, 2024
A Warm Thank You to Our Supporters

By Stephanie Kong | Project Manager, Elephants for Africa

Students eager to answer questions about elephants

Dear EfA Supporters,

We want to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all the donors who generously contributed to our GlobalGiving campaign aimed at supporting rural communities in Botswana. With your invaluable support, we successfully organized a Living With Elephants workshop for children in the rural Boro Ward near Maun, Botswana.

Developed by Elephants for Africa, this new workshop introduced an interactive and practical approach to educating primary school students about elephant behaviour, emphasizing both its significance and safety considerations. We were thrilled to see a remarkable turnout of 70 students, many of whom encounter elephants regularly on their way to school and around their homes and family farms. Given their natural apprehension surrounding potentially dangerous wildlife, the enthusiasm and engagement displayed by the students throughout the workshop was inspiring.

The workshop activities included educational games designed to deepen the students' understanding of elephant ecology and behaviour, while also imparting important lessons on elephant safety in a fun and light-hearted manner. One of the highlights was the introduction of Tembo, a homemade elephant puppet with movable ears and trunk, which proved to be a delightful and effective tool for demonstrating elephant warning signs and other behaviours.

To conclude the workshop, we led an hour-long art session, allowing the students the opportunity to unleash their creativity by crafting their own elephant inspired art using recycled materials. This hands-on workshop not only fostered a positive attitude towards elephants but also provided the students with a deeper understanding of their behaviour and importance in the ecosystem.

Thanks to your generosity, we were able to empower these young minds with knowledge and awareness, empowering and encouraging them to coexist with elephants and live with a little less fear. Once again, thank you for your support in making this initiative a success.

EfA staff assists students with their worksheets

Students meet Tembo the elephant puppet

Students get moving during elephant themed games

Students show off their recycled elephant art

One of our little artists working on her crafts

Students craft elephants using recycled cardboard

It's all smiles at the workshop!

Permalink

Jan 11, 2024
Workshops, fences and community

By Dr Kate Evans | Founder, CEO & PI

Meeting with the farming committe of Rakops

Happy New Year! We hope that you had a wonderful holiday season with friends and family and entered the new year full of energy for whatever projects, both personal and professional, you may have on the horizon.

The role of our Community Co-existence Project is to improve the co-existence of humans and elephants in areas of high human-elephant conflict, and the last quarter of 2023 saw us complete significant milestones as we strive towards our goals.

In the village of Rakops our Community Officers, who are the key contact for community members and farmers in their villages, have completed a 16.6km cluster fence around 77 farmers, incorporating 1700 hectares of arable land! Well done guys. The fence is electrified to protect the land, using solar panels. The farmers are working together to maintain the fence alongside the Community Officers and learning other mitigation techniques to protect their crops. As whilst the fence is a good deterrent, the farmers need to employ other mitigation techniques as elephants are intelligent and any fault in the fenceline, and it will be breached. So we need to be vigilant, not complacent, to ensure that the fence does it’s job.

Living with Elephants Workshops focus on safety awareness and practices when living with elephants. Through interactive workshops, we teach essential skills to reduce the risk of conflict, promoting the safety of both humans and elephants. 200 Community members have been able to attend our workshops recently, and we will continue to provide them to the villages we already work with and expand into Rakops. Expansion into Rakops is dependent on training the Community Officers situated there to lead these workshops independently. Rakops is a little too far away from our headquarters in Khumaga for our Community Outreach and Education Officer to host many Living with Elephants workshops, so a training workshop in May 2024 will see all Elephants for Africa’s Community Officers trained so that we can reach more community members with this valuable workshop.

Looking forward

In 2023, we started a new partnership with the farmers of the village of Motopi to install a cluster fence around 20 farms. To ensure transparency and impartiality and thus ensure long-term community support we undertook a lengthy process of building trust with the community of Motopi as well as selecting from many potential project locations. This process took 11 months, much longer than anticipated, involving 15 visits to Motopi and 6 official meetings with the Village Development Committee (VDC) and Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) Crop Officer, but now we are in a strong position with a farming committee to move into the procurement and construction phase, with a planned completion date of August 2024.

Thank you for support the farmers and communities we have the priviledge of working with and for, we look forward to updating you on their journeys to coexistence.

Rakops farmer installing the fence

Erecting the solar panels that power the fence

Permalink

‹ 1 2 3

About Project Reports

Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.

If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.