By Stephanie Kong | Managing Director
Dear friends,
In 2024, Elephants for Africa built a cluster fence in the small rural village of Phuduhudu with support from the Good Planet Foundation. The goal was straightforward: protect the community's water source, specifically their well and jojo tanks, from elephant damage. Clean, reliable water is foundational to life in the Makgadikgadi, and losing it to a single elephant incursion disrupts crops, livestock, households, and livelihoods.
Something shifts when a community stops bracing for the next crisis. Security creates space for planning, for ambition, for ownership.
This week, we were invited back to Phuduhudu to witness exactly that. The community celebrated the launch of the Herding for Health program, a partnership between Conservation International and the Ministry of Lands and Agriculture. Mobile bomas will now protect livestock as herds graze further from settlements, reducing pressure on wildlife corridors that elephants and other species depend on. A community that was once constantly defending and repairing its water source is now actively shaping how livestock and wildlife share the landscape together.
For EfA, this is what cluster fences are really for. Not just a physical barrier between elephants and crops, but a foundation stable enough that communities can build something on top of it. When people aren't in survival mode, they become partners in conservation rather than bystanders to it, or worse, adversaries.
Seventeen years of working in this landscape has taught us that rural communities don't lack vision. They lack the security to act on it. Every fence we build is an investment in that possibility.
None of this happens without you. To everyone who has supported EfA's work, your generosity reaches further than you might imagine, with a legacy that extends well beyond the initial project. A donation that funds a fence post, a water tank, or a community workshop doesn't just solve today's problem. It plants the conditions for a community in rural Botswana to lead its own future. Thank you for being a part of this.
Sincerely,
The Elephants for Africa Team
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