Conservation is often a hard sell. However, the business of conservation has a heft that appeals to both governments and people looking for pathways out of poverty in Africa.
It is a focus that will enable new avenues of research to take place at Shangani Holistic ranch in Zimbabwe, which will serve as a practical laboratory of innovation for students from different universities pursuing a range of interests, from climate change, to indigenous knowledge, renewable energy, and the economic opportunities of wildlife economies.
Shangani, together with funders Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation, this week signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs), with the African Leadership University (ALU) and the Chinhoyi University of Technology, to allow students to get hands-on experience in conservation practice, research and decision-making.
Shangani Holistic operates as both a wildlife and cattle ranch, which implements innovative conservation principles in an ecologically regenerative and financially sustainable manner.
The MOU with ALU aims to establish a Centre of Conservation Excellence (CCE) whose philosophy is “learning through doing”, says Richard Vigne, the director of the School of Wildlife Conservation (SOWC) in the ALU. The ALU is a hybrid university, offering online access to tertiary education to students in remote areas, but also, with the assistance of funders, hands-on training for poor students who would otherwise not be able to afford it. Vigne refers to the experience as “conservation bootcamp”, which will, according to the MOU between ALU, OGRC and Shangani, “develop an appreciation of the real-time issues faced by communities, managers and other relevant stakeholders including governments, and the solutions that exist to address these problems as well as the opportunities that are emerging within the conservation space. In the process, the aim will be to build the leadership qualities of students as future advocates, ambassadors and change makers promoting Africa-wide sustainable conservation management.”
“The School of Wildlife Conservation is not a traditional school of wildlife in the sense that we don’t teach ecology,” says Vigne. “We don’t teach the sort of the skills that you traditionally associate with conservation. Instead, we believe that a more businesslike approach to conservation and the emerging opportunities therein could make the stewardship of natural resources an economic opportunity for the African continent. We’re the only university that is focusing on opportunities in the wildlife economy.”
This approach is aligned not just to the economic needs and conservation imperatives of the continent, but to the needs of students, or more pertinently, parents.
“Often,” says Vigne, “you have kids who are very passionate about conservation or climate change or what we also refer to as planetary health, but they’re pushed in a different direction because the reality is they need to have a career where they can earn money and parental pressure is high for them to do something in a more traditional career.
“Tertiary education opportunities that are available to a family might be reserved for one of the children because that’s all they can afford. So the desire to push young people down the more traditional career routes – careers such as doctors, lawyers, bankers, industrialists – where they can earn a significant living, probably to support the remainder of the family in the future, is huge.
“And so getting young people into conservation is a difficult thing. But if you can portray conservation as something which offers a career opportunity where there’s an emerging global focus on the need to manage the environment appropriately, where there’s more money coming into that field, where there are financial instruments that are evolving to better monetise the field of conservation, what we loosely call the ‘business of conservation’, then you’ve got a better chance of persuading people that this is something that they should consider.
“But we also see it as an economic opportunity for Africa, if you think of the carbon markets and the biodiversity markets that are beginning to emerge. Africa’s got intact biodiversity compared to the rest of the world, and that theoretically offers a great economic opportunity for the continent. We truly believe it can be that opportunity”.
Exploring these opportunities chimes with research imperatives set out by the Zimbabwean government, says Dr Tawanda Tarakini, the Deputy Dean of the School of Wildlife and Environmental Sciences at the Chinhoyi University of Technology (CUT). The MOU between OGRC, Shangani Holistic and CUT aims to collaborate on research and promote the Zimbabwean Education 5.0 concept.
“Government has adopted what they are calling Education 5.0,” says Tarakini, “which has five pillars. Traditionally, we used to have three pillars, which were teaching, research, and community service. But they have added two more pillars, which are innovation and industrialisation.
“Universities have now been requested to review their curricula so that students have got the skills to produce innovations that will mean something for their lives, for the community, for the environment. If these skills can be commercialised, and scaled up, it will be good. As an example, if you do your research in a small area and you find that maybe if you keep livestock and wildlife at this ranch, you have optimum profits. And you might want to scale it up in an area where that kind of practice was not being done. Or you could exploit carbon credits.”
“For conservation and natural resource management, there’s a lot in terms of research that we are expected to produce,” says Tarakini. “These could be models of better managing the resources, discovering things that we did not know that we have, also documenting natural resources or use patterns that had not been documented. This also covers medicinal resources, traditional knowledge and different genetic resources.”
Research that CUT students will focus on during their time at Shangani will include:
- climate change adaptation and mitigation on ecological ecosystems and human livelihoods; biodiversity conservation;
- ethnobiology and One Health;
- renewable energy initiatives;
- wildlife habitat shifts in a changing climate;
- ecosystem health;
- community based conservation programmes and
- enhancing corporate social responsibility programmes.
“This relationship will benefit us directly,” says Tarakini. “The model that Shangani Holistic has adopted in keeping or producing both livestock and wildlife in the same space is a different model than most of the traditional conservation models that are applied elsewhere.”
He adds that “Shangani has MOUs with two other universities in Zimbabwe and they are encouraging cross pollination of ideas. Besides the direct assistance that we have in terms of funding and the opportunities to further research, having a private landowner presents advantages because some bureaucratic processes might be cut, unlike when you are in a government protected area.”
The person who will ensure that the research objectives at Shangani are met, in collaboration with the academic team at SOWC, is Peter Makumbe, Research Manager at Oppenheimer Generations.
He says that “OGRC catalyses targeted research and harnesses dialogue between research and practice to create impact in African landscapes. OGRC continues to build a first-class research entity which supports, partners with and facilitates African and global researchers to conduct innovative research focused on the natural sciences to ensure practical and impactful outcomes for the benefit of people, places and the planet. At Shangani Holistic, our innovative conservation initiatives supported by the Oppenheimer Family through holistic management provide a perfect model for research and learning. The CCE provides an excellent platform to mould future leaders for Africa by taking science beyond the classroom walls. Our collaboration with Chinhoyi University of Technology is in support of the Zimbabwean Government’s Education 5.0 model as we provide a field site for research and experiments that can result in products and services which can be commercialised”.
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