Elephants for Africa's Community Empowerment

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.