48 



was our primary challenge. We prefer to think of all these issues as one: unsustainability of 

 resource use. Though it has many causes, and the African Wildlife Foundation does not 

 approach it from ail its many angles, our work addresses the whole issue. 



When the founders of the Foundation began their work in the early 1960's, "conservation", as 

 its practitioners currently describe it, didn't exist. But many of the basic needs of then pre- 

 independence Africa were similar in nature to those we encounter today: namely, institutional 

 development, capacity-building among conservation professionals, and smoother resolution of the 

 inevitable conflict between people and wild animals. It is mostly the extent of these problems 

 that have multiplied since then, with the emergence of industrial-scale poaching, population 

 growth, and a continent-wide economy that refuses to strengthen. Certainly we can say that 

 conservation institutions and professionals have made great strides since the 60's, in a great 

 many different countries. But I would argue that the conservation community in the 1990's is 

 trying to repair many of the same parts that were broken twenty or thirty years ago. Our 

 progress ras been in diagnosing the problems, and, to some extent, putting the initial work into 

 axing them. Needless to say, we have a long way to go. 



It has been written and said many limes that if people are to conserve their natural resources, 

 they must value them as sources of wealth. No one who has worked in the field in Africa 

 seriously argues with this mantra of self-interest. And yet, implementing it has never been 

 simple. Like rural resources users anywhere, including in the United States, Africans take a 

 comprehensive view of their self-interest, a view which values stability in their resource-use 

 arrangements as much as the immediate generation of economic benefits, whenever possible. If 

 conservation authorities in Africa expect resource users to harvest from their environment 

 sustamably, then they must provide, in return, a reasonable expectation that the relationship 

 between themselves and the resource users will also be stable. In short, our self-interest solution 

 depends on the institutions involved achieving a certain level of development. Community 

 conservation arrangements must be dependable, and clearly supported by governments, to work. 

 This is precisely the direction AWT takes in much of its work. 



We call our community conservation program "Neighbors as Partners". Unlike the worthy work 

 of some other conservation organizations, we concentrate on communities surrounding protected 

 areas, because a very large percentage of the remaining wildlife in East Africa is concentrated in 

 parks and reserves, and it spills out frequently. In Kenya, our experience in the field has led to 

 a current project, called COBRA (Conservation of Biodiverse Rich Areas), which is wholly 

 funded by USAID. The case history of community conservation in Kenya is a good lesson for 

 those interested in putting scarce conservation resources where they are most needed. 



Since Tsavo We>l National Park was first gazetted, the Maasai livestock herders surrounding it 

 have no; always been able to observe restrictions put on grazing in the park. These restrictions 

 came at a time when much land previously devoted to grazing was coming under more intense 

 agriculture; as a result the Maasai were forced to look farther afield for land for their herds. In 

 dry seasons especially, the Park became an inviting solution, and no amount of force could 

 prevent these resource users from entering. We had a classic example of environmental stress, 



