CONTRIBUTION
The Elephant Crisis Fund with which the organization Save the Elephants funds community-led conservation projects in 34 African countries, receives this year’s Worldwide Award for Biodiversity Conservation in recognition of its groundbreaking work to preserve these iconic animals. The project was initially set up to combat the illegal ivory trade. Seven years ago, building on the success of these efforts, it enlarged its program to address what are now the two greatest challenges facing elephant populations: the protection of their landscapes and their safe coexistence with humans. A key means to address these challenges is to strengthen the local communities that live alongside elephants, transforming them into powerful allies for their conservation.
The organization Save the Elephants was founded in Kenya in 1993, with science and community partnership as its main pillars, to research into the animals’ ecology and behavior and develop strategies for their conservation across the African continent. Two decades later, it set up a dedicated fund, the Elephant Crisis Fund, to support small, communityled conservation projects in 34 African countries, at times using them as a testing ground to attract much larger funding.
“Big investors are often keen to donate millions of dollars for a given strategy, but they have no way of knowing if it will be successful,” explains Frank Pope, the Save the Elephants CEO. “So we fund a project of, say, 50,000 dollars on a trial basis, knowing it can catalyze a far larger investment if we can make it work.”
The Fund was initially set up to tackle the crisis of the ivory trade, which for centuries had posed the greatest threat to the elephants’ survival. Despite being banned internationally in 1989, an illegal ivory trading network continued to exist, which the organization estimates killed some 100,000 elephants between 2010 and 2012 alone, a quarter of the then extant population.
Its remit at the time was to support the organizations on the ground that Save the Elephants had identified as being most effective at shielding the animals from ivory hunters, providing them not only with cash but also with the latest techniques and technologies to put a stop to poaching, trafficking and the demand for ivory. It was also the first organization to bring traffickers to trial in the United States, ending the impunity they had long enjoyed by exploiting international loopholes and, within Africa, the corruption of local judicial systems.
“We are constantly traveling to the countries we work with, listening to communities about which ideas work, so we can suggest them to others and ensure the knowledge gets shared,” says Pope. Another key to their success is their speed in getting applications processed. The Fund encourages applicants to submit short proposals, which are decided on at monthly meetings, and once funding has been approved it reaches the chosen project in a couple of weeks.
These efforts had their reward in 2018, when China, the world’s biggest market, announced that it was closing down its domestic trade in ivory. And this was not their only success. In Chad, for instance, the work done by Save the Elephants helped the elephant population pull itself back from just one birth in 2011 to 127 calves born in 2018. At this point, the organization considered winding up the Elephant Crisis Fund, but decided that the vast network of contacts it had built up over the years could be used to go on monitoring elephant trafficking and address what had become the next big challenge: coexistence with humans.
Elephants may at times break water storage tanks in lower rainfall areas, prompting the tribes that live there to seek revenge. But the greatest conflicts occur in wetter areas where people eke out a living from subsistence farming. “Elephants don’t know what a crop field is, so they come into a cornfield and in one evening they can demolish a whole family’s food,” Pope explains. “Even if that family used to feel positive towards elephants, they will quickly turn against them out of self-protection. This kind of conflict can also turn political, because elephants come to represent wildlife in general, and people start saying ‘why do you care more about these animals than you do about people?’ And, if you can’t address the problem, they turn against not just elephants but the whole of nature.”
What is needed then, the CEO continues, are sustainable tools that empower communities to deal with the conflict themselves. Elephants are also – he points out – a keystone species in the ecosystem.
As well as dispersing seeds, they can detect water and open paths through the bush for other species to follow. Pope offers the example of the Kenyan nature reserve Masai Mara, whose broad plains are regularly traversed by cheetahs and lions. “The look of the area would be totally different if it wasn’t for elephants and fire. Between them, these two forces keep the landscape open, and these short grass plains for which the region is famous sustain some of the richest biodiversity on earth.”
To dial down conflict with humans, the awardee organization has come up with a “toolbox” that brings together tested knowledge of which strategies work to prevent or mitigate elephant-human clashes. Faced with the challenge of possessing a vast amount of experience amassed across the continent by groups that had little or no opportunity to share it, Save the Elephants decided to use its network to pool this expertise and consolidate it into a visual guide aimed primarily at community organizations in affected areas, as well as grassroots NGOs working daily on the ground.
The organization is clear that its priority lies in prevention before mitigation. For “once you have a conflict,” Pope points out, “it’s very hard to stop it.” Elephant corridors are a case in point. “If you build a village in one of its corridors, the elephant is still going to use the corridor, but this time it will pass through your village, with the risk that it may attack people. The solution is to plan building works and crop fields so they don’t stand within the corridors the elephants use. Leaving some areas of land free for the elephants can avoid a lot of conflicts.”
It has also funded projects aimed directly at improving the animals’ image with local communities. One instance was the partnership formed with filmmakers Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble to produce the documentary The Elephant Queen on elephants and their ecosystem. Apple bought the film and Save the Elephants used the proceeds to build a mobile cinema unit comprising a specialized truck, an inflatable screen and a good sound system. They then took the film to communities around Kenya. “Many of those watching had never seen a film before, let alone a wildlife documentary,” Pope recalls, “but the screenings brought in hundreds of people.” Although the real impact of this kind of initiative is hard to measure – the reason it wasn’t paid for through the awardee fund – the data available suggests that it did have a significant effect on people’s attitudes, which persisted for at least six months. “And our instinct,” he adds, “is that this effect is greater than we’ve been able to measure empirically.”
“We subscribe to the ideas of One Health,” the CEO continues. “If people are malnourished and children aren’t able to go to school, they’re not going to care about what’s happening with elephants. So part of our work is to empower communities.” Among the ways to do so, and at the same time aid the cause of elephant conservation, are growing crops that are not edible by elephants, promoting craft work and sales as an alternative livelihood, and strengthening judicial protection. “Africa has the world’s fastest growing population. As the continent develops, the landscape changes, and elephants are stuck in the middle of it all. We have a window of opportunity to ensure that elephants’ needs are also taken into account in ways that will help them thrive long into the future while reducing conflict between them and humans.”
Photo: © Will Burrard-Lucas