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Much, if not most, of Africa's wildlife lives outside of parks and other protected areas. As long as conservation operates on the notion that saving wild animals means keeping them as far away as possible from human beings, it will become less and less relevant to modern Africans.' So WWF Africa Programme Officer Tom McShane sums up the viewpoint underpinning WWF's community-based conservation project in rural Namibia. In the past, wildlife conservation in Africa has usually involved setting up protected areas and moving the local people elsewhere. Excluded not only physically but also from planning and consultation, such people had no stake in developing the game reserve, and seldom benefited from it economically. It's not surprising, then, that many rural communities don't see the point of wildlife conservation or are inimical to it. Why not hunt if you need food or can sell skins? Why protect the elephant if it's going to trample your crops? Yes, wildlife attracts tourism, but tourists, even when bearing gifts, can also prove a mixed blessing, provoking mutually degrading relationships and social disruption. Instead of marginalizing them, WWF seeks to involve local communities more closely in conservation and tourism (which are already mutually co-dependent), so that all three elements are integrated in the rural economy. In Namibia, in collaboration with Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC), WWF has established a network of commmunity game guards, who assume direct responsibility for keeping tabs on wild animals, and on poaching, in their area. After illegal hunting on a vast scale in the 1970s, wildlife populations are now recovering, and where numbers permit, hunting is now encouraged on a communal basis, with each village selecting its own hunters to take part in the annual game harvest. The meat is distributed, and skins are sold, so that everyone benefits. WWF has also made considerable progress in the development of eco-tourism (tourism that does not disrupt the environment or the local way of life). It has been made possible for the first time for communities to negotiate directly with tourism businesses, so as to retain some control, and profit from them as appropriate. Two obvious benefits are recruiting locally for guides, tourist camp staff, etc., and instituting a cash 'bed levy' on tourist accommodation, payable to the local community. Women are an important factor in the conservation-tourism equation. Some have set up craft outlets for tourists, helping to preserve old skills in danger of being lost. Others have taken the responsibility of monitoring natural resources such as thatching grass and wild foods. Above all, they are encouraged to participate, with their menfolk, in the ongoing debates on which all progress depends. Tourism and conservation aren't incompatible with small rural economies: they can work together, given mutual benefits and mutual respect.
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