African Wildlife & Environment Issue 80

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

strongly influence the outcome of biodiversity conservation on the African continent over the next two decades. Donors want to see how their money will make a difference in a tangible way and they want transparency and full accountability. After leaving Rwanda after two years, I moved back to Cape Town where I was involved with Nature Conservation Corporation (NCC) and the Cape Leopard Trust, before moving back to my beloved bushveld as Warden of the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve (TPNR), the Umbabat Private Nature Reserve (UPNR) and finally settled at the Selati Game Reserve (SGR) as the General Manager where I celebrated my sixtieth birthday. The last 40 years, where I have been directly involved at the coalface of biodiversity conservation, has been a privilege beyond measure. If you really enjoy and believe in what you are doing, you will never work a day in your life! I cannot help wondering what Princess Diana would be doing today, if her life had not been cut short due to injuries sustained during a car crash in the early hours of the morning of 31 August 1997 in the Ponto de I’Alma tunnel in Paris? She was 36 years old when she died and if she were still alive today, she would have been 60 years old this year in 2021. I am grateful to also have reached this milestone, and I have learned that we need to adapt to circumstances (such as the Covid-19 Pandemic). However, we only have a short window of opportunity to make wise decisions with regards to this planet, the only one we have, or we will be looking at dire consequences of apocalyptic proportions in the not-too-distant future, for all humankind. Let us learn to tread lightly and find practical ways to have influence, which will count.

I was offered a job by African Parks to go and get the public/private/partnership off the ground in Rwanda at the Akagera National Park. African Parks is an incredible organisation that has had such a positive influence on the African Continent. They are a non-profit conservation organization that takes on direct responsibility for the rehabilitation and long-term management of protected areas in partnership with governments and local communities. They currently manage nineteen national parks and protected areas in eleven countries covering over 14.7 million ha in: Angola, Benin, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The organisation was founded in 2000 in response to the dramatic decline of African protected areas, due to poor management and lack of funding. African Parks uses a clear business approach to conserving Africa’s wildlife and remaining wild areas, securing vast landscapes, and conducting the necessary activities needed to protect the parks and their wildlife. African Parks maintains a strong focus on economic development and poverty alleviation of surrounding communities to ensure that each park is ecologically, socially, and financially sustainable in the long term. Their goal is to manage thirty parks by 2030. The geographic spread of protected areas and representation of different ecoregions make this the largest and most ecologically diverse portfolio of parks under management by any one NGO on the continent. On 8 June 2021, the Wyss Foundation announced a commitment of up to USD 108 million to African Parks. On 14 September 2021, The Rob and Melani Walton Foundation (RMWF) also committed USD 100 million to African Parks. These two philanthropic commitments are of the largest contributions ever made to the conservation of protected areas in Africa. Both these foundations have funded African Parks before, and these new commitments just show the faith that they have in African Parks. The Walton Family Foundation was very instrumental and supportive in getting the Akagera project going. This is one of the flagship projects of African Parks, where the park has become ecologically, socially, and economically sustainable since management was taken over 2010. I believe that organizations like African Parks will

Bryan Havemann General Manager Selati Game Reserve gm@selatigamereserve.co.za

33 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 80 (2021)