WIDER REACH
Since our inception in 2019 we have been supporting two long-running initiatives in Southern Africa. This support has taken the form of fundraising and grant-making towards the sustainability of these two initiatives which are described in more detail below.
Founded by Dr. Steve Boyes out of a small village called Hogsback in the Eastern Cape province in South Africa, the Cape Parrot Project (CPP) has been working for the past 15 years to keep South Africa’s only endemic parrot safe in the wild by securing critical habitats for the benefit of wildlife, ecosystems and people in perpetuity. It does this by using research to fill key knowledge gaps and partnering with local communities for habitat restoration.
The Project restores and protects local Afromontane indigenous forests through managing alien vegetation to assist natural forest regeneration; and supplement planting with indigenous species where appropriate. The Project prides itself in partnering and supporting community members to grow seedlings which the Project then buys back. Together with members of these local communities, CPP plants these seedlings back into appropriate degraded forest habitats.
The Cape Parrot Project and Wild Bird Trust were involved in developing a Cape Parrot and Mistbelt Forest Action Plan, where the vision is a thriving population of Cape Parrots acting as a flagship for the protection and recovery of indigenous forests in South Africa for the shared benefit of people and nature. CPP are a BirdLife Species Guardian and as instrumental stakeholders, their work is closely aligned with the Cape Parrot and Mistbelt Habitat Conservation Action Plan that they helped produce in 2019.
The founding objective of the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project, a partnership between the Wild Bird Trust and the National Geographic Society, is to explore and survey the least-known, most inaccessible parts of the Okavango River Basin.
The Okavango Delta, located in northern Botswana, is one of the largest freshwater wetlands in Southern Africa. It falls within the larger Okavango River Basin which spans the countries of Angola, Namibia and Botswana and is the main source of water for a million people, and one of Africa’s richest places for biodiversity—home to over half of the remaining elephants on the planet, as well as populations of lions, leopards, wild dogs, buffaloes, giraffes, hippos and rhinos.
The Okavango-Zambezi Water Tower, which begins in Angola, is the primary water source for the Okavango Delta. This region’s vast landscape of lakes, peatlands, Miombo woodlands and rivers provides sanctuary for a high concentration of biodiversity. Protecting this water tower—known by the Luchaze people as Lisima Iya Mwono, or “Source of Life”—is fundamental to the future of the Okavango, Kwando and Zambezi rivers.
By 2030, in partnership with local communities, governments and NGOs, “The Wilderness Project” aims to explore, study and protect 1 million square kilometers of valuable African wilderness. Central to this effort is the remote “Great Spine of Africa”, the gatekeeper of the unprotected sources of Africa’s greatest river basins – Okavango, Zambezi, Congo, Nile, Chad and Niger.