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The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), founded in 1961 as the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, is an international conservation organization that focuses on critically important landscapes in Africa.

When founded in 1961, the purpose was to train Africans to maintain game reserves professionally, ensuring an adequate supply of game for hunters on safari. Later, the mandate evolved to supporting western scientists in studies of protected animals in their natural habitat. More recently, the focus has been on developing sustainable systems that benefit both animals and local human communities.

AWF employs a pan-African approach to their work by addressing the impacts of rising human population growth and climate change. Continent-wide, they focus their efforts where intervention is most needed and will make the greatest impact- with the ultimate goal of ensuring that Africa's wildlife and wild lands will endure forever. While supporting education and other programs, the main focus of the AWF is now on developing nine "heartlands", large ecologically important areas that typically span national boundaries. These are home to endangered or threatened species that include the West African giraffe, mountain gorillas, bonobos, Grévy's zebra, white rhinos, black rhinos, lions, leopards, Lycaon pictus (African Wild Dog), and elephants.

Early Years

The African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (AWLF) was founded in 1961 by Russell E. Train, a wealthy judge and hunter, and member of the Washington Safari Club. Other founding members from the Safari Club were Nick Arundel, a former United States Marine Corps combat officer and journalist, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. of the CIA, James S. Bugg, a business man and Maurice Stans, later to be Richard Nixon's finance chairman.

Train was worried that European park managers would be replaced by unqualified Africans in conservation work as African countries gained their independence. Twenty African countries became independent in 1960 and 1961. Train wrote "In Tanganyika alone, the government recently ordered 100 percent Africanization of the game service by 1966! ... Replacement of European staff by intrained, unqualified men spells disaster for the game". He felt that it was urgent to train Africans to become wildlife professionals.

The first major grant of the AWLF was $47,000 to help found the College of African Wildlife Management at Mweka, Tanzania in 1963. The college was organized by Bruce Kinloch, Chief Game Warden of Tanganyika, as a pioneer institution for the training of African wildlife managers. Funding for Mweka was also provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Frankfurt Zoological Society, with facilities donated by the government of Tanganyika. By 2010 the college had trained over 4,500 wildlife managers from 28 African countries and 18 non-African countries.

In 1963 AWLF started a scholarship program to bring young Africans to American universities where they could study biology and wildlife management. The AWLF built a conservation education center in the same year, situated at the entrance to the Nairobi National Park. In 1967 the AWLF provided $50,000 to finance construction of a Research Institute in Tanzania. In 1970 the AWF established a school for wildlife management in Garoua, Cameroon, giving instruction in French. During the 1970s and 1980s the AWLF continued to finance students, and also assisted conservation projects, often giving supplies such as tents, vehicle spare parts, water pumps and photographic equipment rather than cash.

In 1969 the AWLF took the lead in a campaign supported by other conservation groups to protect rhinos. In 1974 the foundation began a program to study cheetahs. In 1983 the AWF dropped "Leadership" from its name. While Train was disappointed with the change, feeling that the organization had lost sight of its original mandate and had become just another conservation organization, giving funding to westerners to conduct research on animals, AWF has evolved over the past decades in both its mission and formation of conservation projects.

In 1988, AWF launched its "Save the Elephants" campaign while designating 1988 the "Year of the Elephant." Three years later AWF formed the International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP) with Flora & Fauna International and World Wide Fund for Nature, a regional strategy to protect mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. Despite the civil conflict in Rwanda in 1996, and although many aid workers left the region, IGCP personnel remained to protect Virunga mountain gorillas; no gorillas were killed in 1996 and at least nine babies were born in Rwanda alone. It was also during 1996 that AWF established its first Conservation Service Center in Arusha, Tanzania and hired a team of African professionals to begin helping communities that live near wildlife to benefit from their natural resources. Further outreach was conducted two years later when AWF and the Amboseli Elephant Research Project met with Maasai leaders and offered them the opportunity to participate in a plan that compensates owners for livestock killed by elephants outside the parks.

The turn of the century saw the continuation and expansion of AWF's Heartlands project. In 2001 Tanzania's President, Benjamin Mkapa, declared that the government-owned Manyara Ranch will be protected as a major wildlife corridor and gives the ranch to the conservation trust facilitated by AWF. Three years later, thanks to a partnership between AWF, USAID, and Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA), a new Visitor Center at Lake Manyara National Park was opened. The center now educates visitors about the park's importance and the effort to conserve the natural resources of the area. in 2005, AWF helped design and implement the Kenya Land Conservation Trust (KLCT), a new national body which allows land to be privately held for conservation, thus supplementing the traditional government parks and reserves, thereby putting conservation in the hands of the local community. Continuing this focus on local communities, AWF's Conservation Enterprise team opened three new ecolodges that benefit local communities: Satao Elerai Camp in Kenya, Clouds Mountain Gorilla Lodge in Uganda, and Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge in Rwanda. The following year President Dr. Helen Gichohi is featured in Milking the Rhino, the first major documentary to explore wildlife conservation from the perspective of people who have lived alongside wildlife all their lives.

In 2010, in the Kazungula Heartland, AWF established the Sekute Conservation Area in partnership with the Sekute Chiefdom. The establishment of the Sekute Conservation Area provides community and private sector investment opportunities for its ecotourism and auxiliary enterprises; currently the Trust has entered into a private/community partnership for the establishment of a four star eco-lodge. Celebrating its 50th Anniversary in 2011, AWF supported the opening of Ngoma Lodge in northern Botswana, providing jobs and continuous income for local communities.

Current Conservation Ethos

The African Wildlife Foundation, together with the people of Africa, works to ensure the wildlife and wild lands of Africa endure for future generations. Through fifty years of experience, AWF learned that a lasting future for Africa's wildlife and wild lands, and a future that prioritizes the needs of Africa's people, invokes conservation work across four key areas of focus.

Land and Habitat

AWF advocates that wildlife needs room to roam beyond officially protected lands. Through zoning, community land-use planning, land-easement agreements, and more, AWF works to preserve as much land and habitat as possible. The “Heartlands”—which span national parks and local villages, government lands and private properties—are key to sustaining wildlife populations and diversity into the future. When sustainably maintained, they provide long-lasting economic benefit for surrounding communities.

Capacity Building

Empowering Africans to be Africa’s stewards is at the core of AWF’s strategy. Realizing that those who live on the land are best suited to protect it, AWF invests heavily in education and training by providing university scholarships for Africans studying conservation or training community members in sustainable agricultural practices. At the national level, AWF lends its conservation expertise to governments seeking additional support in natural resources management.

Conservation Enterprise

Conservation is sometimes hard to understand for those struggling to make ends meet and experiencing conflict from local wildlife. AWF works with communities to build enterprises that allow residents to benefit from wildlife— and ultimately helps them understand that wildlife can be a boon, not a bane, for their prosperity. These include eco- tourist lodges, aquaculture projects, and livestock management programs, among many other possibilities.

Conservation Science

AWF conducts research on a cadre of Africa’s endangered and iconic species. Its large corps of scientists—most of whom are native Africans—study species’ movement and habitats so they can better define interventions to mitigate human–wildlife conflict and determine how to best partner with communities to protect Africa’s wildlife.

Heartlands

The AWF names the landscapes that it supports "heartlands". Heartlands include:

Congo

The Maringa-Lopori-Wamba Landscape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo one of the least developed and most remote parts of the Congo Basin. The inhabitants are among the poorest in Africa, depending on natural resources to meet their basic needs. Most of the people live by slash-and-burn agriculture, and rely on bushmeat such as porcupine, sitatunga, and forest hog for protein. Cash crops include maize, cassave and groundnuts. The growing population is placing more stress on the environment, and there is risk of a revival of logging that could harm the ability of the land to sustain the people and could jeopardize both biodiversity.

Since 1973 a Japanese team has been researching the bonobo population near the village of Wamba in 1973. However, research was discontinued after political disorders started in 1991 followed by civil war in 1997, resuming only in the mid-2000s. The IUCN Red List classifies bonobos as an endangered species with conservative population estimates ranging from 29,500 to 50,000 individuals. The AWF has led efforts by local and international groups to develop a sustainable land use plan for the MLW Landscape. The plan aims to ensure that the economic and cultural needs of the inhabitants are met while conserving the environment. The approach combines AWF's Heartland Conservation Process and the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE) Program Monitoring Plan. A variety of tools are used including surveys, interviews with local people and satellite image interpretation.

Kazungula

The floodplains of the Zambezi River are surrounded by a mosaic of Miombo and Mopane woodlands and grasslands that include important wildlife migration corridors. The Victoria Falls, the largest in the world, are between Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park in Zambia and Victoria Falls National Park in Zimbabwe. The Falls and surrounding area are designated a World Heritage Site. However, the environment is threatened by growing and haphazard development of tourism, and lack of funding to the park authorities.

The AWF has established the 160,000 acres (65,000 ha) Sekute Conservation Area in this region in partnership with the Sekute Chiefdom, holding two elephant corridors. AWF helped wildlife authorities settle four new white rhinos in Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park in Zambia, joining the last surviving white Rhino in the country, a bull. On 17 January 2011 it was reported that two of the female white rhinos had given birth to calves, which seemed healthy. The area is also home to endangered black rhinos. In 2011 a cluster of modern new buildings for the Lupani community school were opened in Kazungula, built by the AWF at a cost of US$250,000. The new school has six classrooms, offices and five teachers' houses with three bedrooms each.

Kilimanjaro

Disney released the movie African Cats in April 2011. The Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund gave AWF a portion of the proceeds from the first week's ticket sales for use in protecting the Amboseli Wildlife Corridor. Their "See 'African Cats,' Save the Savanna" program served both to promote the movie and to raise money for conservation.

Limpopo

The Limpopo Heartland includes areas of Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. It includes savanna, woodland, rivers and floodplains. Fauna include sable antelope, rhinos, hippos, and many species of birds, insects and aquatic life. The AWF has started the Leopard Conservation Science Project in this heartland . The AWF is particularly involved in the Banhine National Park in Mozambique, which covers 7,000 square kilometres (2,700 sq mi). Until recently this park had little or no infrastructure or staff to ensure that the environment was protected. The AWF has built a conservation research center, which it is marketing to the international scientific community. Fees from researchers will pay for staff to run the center and to manage the park.

The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) is a 35,000 square kilometres (14,000 sq mi) park that is being established to connect the Kruger National Park in South Africa, the Limpopo National Park in Mozambique, the Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe and other protected areas. It is almost as big as the Netherlands and more than three times larger than the Yellowstone National Park. The GLTP is home to many of the species most popular with tourists, including lion, white and black rhinoceros, giraffe, elephant, hippopotamus and buffalo. The AWF says the megapark will result in "creating new jobs and fortifying a tourism base not yet meeting its full potential". The AWF is a major sponsor of the project that is setting up this park.

Maasai Steppe

The 35,000 acres (14,000 ha) Manyara Ranch Conservancy is near to Lake Manyara in Tanzania. This is a pioneering conservation and tourism project supported by the African Wildlife Foundation, the Tanzania Land Conservation Trust and the Manyara Ranch Conservancy. While not a park, the conservancy is frequented by resident and migrating wildlife including elephant, lion, buffalo, leopard and the more common plains game. Rarely seen in the parks but a common resident on the Conservancy is the Lesser Kudu.

Parc W

This 1,823,280 hectares (7,039.7 sq mi) region is located around the point where Niger, Burkina Faso and Benin meet. It consists of three national protected parks that form a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the trans-national W National Park, as well as several adjacent reserves and buffer zones. The complex includes savanna woodlands, gallery forests and flooded plains where the Mekrou and Niver rivers meet. It is home to large and diverse wildlife populations including the largest population of elephants in the region and the only remaining West African Giraffes. Mitochondrial and nuclear DNA research shows that this is a distinct and genetically healthy subspecies that diverged from the Rothschild's giraffe about 350,000 years ago.

In Parc W, AWF and other International NGOs such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature, World Wide Fund for Nature and Africa 70 play a central role in communication, education and organization of local communities and their leaders, and help collect socio-economic and technical data. AWF is helping fund tree nurseries in Niger and Burkino Faso for replantings to provide fodder for the giraffes. Conservation threats are human population growth and desertification. AWF partners in the region include the Association pour la Sauvegarde des Girafes du Niger, Centre National de Gestion des Réserves de Faune (CENAGREF), Benin and the Ministries of the Environment in Burkina Faso and Niger.

Samburu

The EarthWatch Institute operates a program where volunteers are given basic accommodations at their Center for Drylands Research in Wamba. The volunteers count and photograph endangered Grevy's zebras, of which there are about 2,000 in the region, and record GIS locations, activities and other observations of wildlife, livestock and people. The data is used to prepare GIS maps that show the distribution of zebras in relation to predators, humans, and habitat, which are shared with the AWF and the local communities.

A highly critical film by the British journalist Oliver Steeds named "Conservation's Dirty Secrets" was aired on June 20 on the United Kingdom's Channel 4. It portrays the alleged role of the AWF in forcible displacement of Kenyan Samburu pastoralists. Steeds interviewed evicted Samburu elders while the film showed their homes being burned down and Kenyan police trying to arrest his Samburu guides.

Virunga

The Virunga landscape is an area of volcanic highlands around the point where Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo meet, Virunga is home to the last 700 mountain gorillas in the world. It includes the Mgahinga Gorilla National Park in Uganda, where AWF opened a visitor center in July 2006. The Virunga ecosystem is highly diverse, and also shelters chimpanzees, golden monkeys, forest elephants, and many species of birds, reptiles and amphibians. The region is overpopulated, intensely poor and politically unstable, placing severe threats on the environment.

The AWF helped Dian Fossey study Rwandan mountain gorillas in the 1960s. AWF President Robinson McIlvaine later said that "There would be no mountain gorillas in the Virungas today ... were it not for Dian Fossey's tireless efforts over many years". McIlvaine initiated formation of a consortium to protect the threatened Rwandan mountain gorillas while he was president of the AWF between 1978 and 1982. More recently, the AWF coordinated fundraising and construction of a lodge overlooking the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, home of about half the worlds population of mountain gorillas.

According the Farley Mowat in his book Woman in the Mists, in the late 1970s Fossey asked McIlvaine to temporarily serve as secretary-treasurer of the Digit Fund while he was AWF President. She had created the fund to finance patrols against poachers seeking to kill mountain gorillas. McIlvaine partnered with the International Primate Protection League, the Digit Fund, and his own AWF asking for funds, to be made out to the AWF. The Digit Fund received none of the money. When McIlvaine suggested to Fossey that the Digit Fund could be folded into AWF, Fossey declined and McIlvaine resigned as secretary-treasurer of the fund.

The AWF is a co-sponsor of the International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP) in Virunga, the others being Fauna & Flora International (FFI) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Among other activities, the IGCP works with Virunga Artisans, which markets hand-made products of artisans who live near the Volcanoes, Mgahinga and Bwindi National Parks. A census of mountain gorillas in the Virunga Massif in March and April 2010 showed that there had been a 26.3% increase in the population over the past seven years, an encouraging sign that conservation efforts were succeeding.

Organization

The African Wildlife Foundation headquarters are in Nairobi, Kenya, with satellite offices in South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Washington, DC. The organization is tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. As of 2011 there were 36 members of the Board and 132 paid staff. Funds are raised through direct mail, grant proposals, Internet appeals, planned giving, cause-related marketing, and membership appeals. The executive heads of the foundation have been:

The AWF is a member of International Conservation Caucus Foundation's Conservation Council. It is also a member of EarthShare, a national federation that supports leading American environmental and conservation charities. As of 2011, AWF, for the tenth year in a row, earned the highest rating possible from Charity Navigator, the largest independent evaluator of charities in the United Stats.

The foundation had income of US$19,333,998 in the fiscal year ended 30 June 2009. Of this, $8,582,555 came from public sector support, $5,815,839 from corporate and foundation support, $5,224,931 from gifts from individuals and $1,360,424 from legacy gifts. $17,395,456 was spent on programs, $1,524,764 on fund raising and $1,262,056 in administration. Program funding broke down as $14,174,224 on conservation programs, $2,392,989 on public education and $828,243 on membership programs.

Successes & Vision for the Future

Notes

1. About AWF.
2. Russell E. Train.
3. Virginia Assembly...
4. ^ Train 2003, p. 44.
5. Harrison 2009.
6. Bonner 1993, pp. 56–57.
7. Bonner 1993, pp. 57.
8. Bonner 1993, pp. 58.
9. Eyeball to eyeball...
10. Last Stand...
11. ^ Conserving Wildlife - 14 years.
12. The African Heartlands.
13. ^ Dupain et al. 2008, p. 329.
14. Dupain et al. 2008, p. 331.
15. Dupain et al. 2008, p. 332.
16. Kimura 2009, pp. 209–225.
17. Pan paniscus: IUCN.
18. Dupain et al. 2008.
19. ^ Kazungula Heartland.
20. Mosi-Oa-Tunya.
21. Exciting News...
22. Lombe 2011.
23. Disney's African Cats.
24. Limpopo Heartland.
25. Revealing the Leopard.
26. Strengthening Banhine.
27. Great Limpopo Transfrontier.
28. Seven Elephants...
29. Making Conservation Our Business.
30. ^ Parc W Heartland.
31. World's rarest giraffe.
32. Strategie Nationale.
33. Conserving Grevy's Zebra.
34. Campaign Update – Kenya.
35. Virunga Heartland.
36. Celebrating AWF's 40th.
37. Robinson McIlvaine.
38. Clouds Mountain Gorilla Lodge.
39. Mowat 1987, pp. 202–203.
40. About Virunga Artisans.
41. Masozera 2010.
42. ^ BBB Wise Giving...
43. AWF's History.
44. Conservation Council.
45. Who We Support.
46. Charity Navigator.

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• Conservation organizations based in the United States
• Organizations established in 1961