Easing the Burden of Covid 19

[ An all ladies community game drive ]

EASING THE BURDEN

OF COVID 19 IMPACTS IN COMMUNITIES SURROUNDING South Luangwa[ WRITER: Rachel McRobb, CEO CSL ] [ PHOTO: Conservation South Luangwa ]

The wildlife stronghold of the South Luangwa Valley, is Zambia’s premiere safari tourism destination and is home to many of the countries important populations of wildlife. With over a dozen established lodges and 20+ bush camps in South Luangwa, businesses are normally thriving at this time of year, and a very large local service sector is key to this lucrative and growing wildlife-based economy. In 2020, the COVID-19 crisis suddenly threw this economy, ecosystem, and its dependent communities into an unprecedented emergency.

With the global collapse of tourism and air-travel, most of these businesses came to a grinding halt and an estimated 800 safari employees are currently not working or at home on reduced wages, with large numbers of dependent family members. All lodges are doing all they can to support their staff during this time. A spike in wildlife snaring and conflict was expected as communities unsurprisingly turn to natural resources to survive.

In an effort to ease the burden of COVID 19 impacts in local communities and retain and increase trust and tolerance from communities and tourism staff towards conservation partners, Conservation South Luangwa (CSL) and the Zambian Carnivore program (ZCP) implemented community game drives and community clean sweeps in 2020 with financial support from Lion Recovery Fund.

These activities aim to engage communities to deliver paid conservation services at the same time as putting essential financial income in to individual households and villages during uncertain times of hunger and poverty.

[ Enjoying a break during the game drive ]

Community Game Drives

The Experience, Enjoy, Protect Community game drives have been a huge success with the first drives starting at the end of July. To date, almost 900 people have been on a game drive of which 59% had never been on a drive before. Ages ranged from 5 to 85 years old and 58 % were female. $4500 / K90,000 has been paid out to safaris guides and local vehicle owners.

[ Community based safari guide and local vehicle hire ]

[ Clean sweep team at the end of the sweep ]

Clean Sweeps

The unique ‘Clean Sweeps’ program is also directly targeted at engaging community members usually employed by the tourism industry but currently not due to COVID. Each person is paid for conservation services on a daily basis and a monthly roster drawn up for daily clean sweeps. This program has also been hugely successful with over 450 snares being removed in four months and 700 people engaged in this work and $9000 / K180,000 paid out to tourism staff. For the wildlife, this resulted in zero snared lions reported in South Luangwa, the first time in over a decade. We intend to keep both of the programs running throughout 2021.

[ Clean sweep team at work ]