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highly developed park system, but one of the smallest percentages of land within the fonnal 

 government park system on the continent (but a system that is complimented by a robust 

 conservation private sector). 



The growth of this protected area network has created a continuing need in Afiica is to strengthen 

 the park, wildlife and forestry institutions that manage natural resources. One of African Wildlife 

 Foundation's first projects launched the Wildlife Training College at Mweka, Tanzania in 1962. 

 In the years since, Mweka College has trained a generation of park and wildlife professionals. 

 But we recently found a growing need to upgrade skills through training within the ranks of the 

 existing protected area authorities. U.S. A.I.D. concurred and the agency has been supporting the 

 PARCs project in three regions of Africa—a project that African Wildlife Foundation manages in 

 eastern Afiica, while WWF manages southern Africa, and the Wildlife Conservation Society 

 (WCS) manages central Afiica. Using three U.S. NGOs, the project focuses on strengthening the 

 resources of individual protected area agencies, and in-service training of their staff. 



COMMUNITY-BASED CONSERVATION 



In addition to government protected area capacity-building, a second major focus of African 

 environmental concern has been to strengthen the linkage between protected area agencies, 

 poverty alleviation and community development. Four U.S. A.I.D. -supported Afiican Wildlife 

 Foundation projects specifically focus on this issue: work with Tanzanian Park Agency 

 (T ANAPA) in Tanzania; the "Cobra" project in Kenya: and the Lake Mburo and Bwindi Forest 

 projects in Uganda. In our "Neighbors as Partners" project in Tanzania, Afiican Wildlife 

 Foundation works with TANAPA to build a community outreach program. As a result, 

 TANAPA has a new government benefit-sharing policy, and trained community wardens 

 undertaking extension work outside all twelve of its parks. Now revenue sharing supports 

 digging wells, building schools and staffing health clinics, and for the first time, a non-adversarial 

 relationship is developing. African Wildlife Foundation is a sub-contractor on the "Cobra" project 

 in Kenya, which is seeking to build similar community conservation capacity in the Kenya Wildlife 

 Service. A key aspect of community conservation in Kenya will be greater government tolerance 

 of pastoralism and recognition of the role of this traditional way of life in protecting wildlife. In 

 addition, African Wildlife Foundation is working with communities in and around Lake Mburo 

 National Park and in Bwindi Forest, both in Uganda. 



Although these programs are somewhat different in their specific details, they share a common 

 theme with many conservation project initiated in Afiica during the last decade. Each of these 

 programs seeks to empower local communities to utilize or benefit fi'om wildlife within the 

 communal lands and outside protected areas. These projects share a common belief that only 

 when communities benefit from conservation will they tolerate the costs associated with 

 cohabiting with wildlife or relinquish land to protected areas. The traditional approaches to 

 conservation, where wildlife is solely the province of government agencies and is ofi" limits to 

 communities, will not be sufficient to protect the wildlife or the great migrations of Afiica. In 

 Kenya, as in many areas of Afiica, wildlife outside protected areas has plummeted in the last two 



