Promoting Conservation Tourism: The Case of the African Wildlife Foundation’s Tourism Conservation Enterprises in Kenya
Year
Main event
1961
Launch of the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (AWLF)
1962
Founding of the College of African Wildlife Management, Tanzania
1983
Name change into African Wildlife Foundation (AWF)
1987
‘Neighbours as partner’ programme, focusing on community conservation in Tsavo National Park
1989
Launch of parastatal Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), replacing Kenya’s Wildlife and Conservation Management Department
1992
Conservation of Biodiverse Resource Areas (COBRA) project (until 1998)
1996
Il Ngwesi community lodge opened for business
1997
Commerce, Economics and Conservation (CEC) project
1998
Heartlands programme
1998
Wildlife Enterprise and Business Services (WEBS) project
1999
Conservation of Resources through Enterprises (CORE) project (until 2005)
1999
AWF brokers a fair deal between community and operator at Klein’s Camp, Tanzania
2001
Koija Starbeds lodge opened for business
2007
The Sanctuary at Ol Lentille opened for business
2011
Launch of the African Wildlife Capital (AWC)
In its founding years, ‘fortress conservation’ was central to AWF’s work. This approach emphasized the protection of biodiversity for its intrinsic value in national parks and nature reserves. In Kenya, the first national parks were gazetted in the 1940s and managed by park authorities. As reflected in its founding name, AWF primarily focused on research and education in wildlife conservation with the aim to build up the capacity for African leadership in game and park departments. Exemplary activities include founding a wildlife management training school in Tanzania, offering scholarships for wildlife management studies at US universities, raising funds to establish novel parks and reserves; and supporting park authorities in their work to combat poaching.
While national parks and nature reserves formed a major tourist attraction for Kenya, local communities hardly benefited from this tourism trade. Commercial and subsistence poaching furthermore formed a major threat to the wildlife in the parks and thus to the tourism industry. With wildlife roaming outside national parks (and the associated human–wildlife conflicts) and national parks being too small for healthy wildlife populations, the need for community involvement in conservation became evident in the 1980s. The central premise was that communities neighboring on parks should benefit from the wildlife, so that this would change their attitude towards wildlife and to get them to help protecting it. Although such community-based conservation was already experimented with around Amboseli national park in the 1950s (Western and Wright 1994), community-based conservation became the focal point of AWF’s conservation work in the 1980s. Supported by bilateral donors, such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID), AWF engaged in outreach activities and benefit-sharing programs. Community-based conservation was spearheaded by the 1977 ban on sport hunting, which made the need to protect wildlife for photographic tourism more pressing in Kenya. As AWF increasingly engaged in field work and its activity portfolio thus moved beyond education and capacity building, it changed its name in 1983 into African Wildlife Foundation (Sachedina 2008).
Concurrent with CBNRM developments in southern African countries, community-based conservation became more entrenched in Kenya’s conservation field in the 1990s. More specifically, USAID started the COBRA (Conservation of Biodiverse Resource Areas) project to support the in 1989 instated Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), in its efforts to implement community-based wildlife conservation and management. The COBRA project ran from 1992 to 1998 with the aim to increase the socio-economic benefits from wildlife to the communities neighboring on parks. For instance, ecotourism projects, such as the community-based Il Ngwesi lodge, were experimented with under COBRA (e.g. Manyara and Jones 2007). Although promising, the ecotourism projects also made clear that communities lacked the entrepreneurial skills and savvy needed to turn these lodges into economically viable enterprises. Partnerships with private sector parties were hence seen as the way forward (Watson 1999).
Building on its experiences as a subcontractor in the COBRA project and sponsored by several donors, AWF started to include the enterprise approach in its own conservation work. More specifically, it started a project in 1997, in which numerous studies were conducted on how wildlife could ‘pay for itself’. It also collaborated in a research project on community-based conservation in Kenya, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe (Hulme and Murphree 2001). Furthermore, AWF launched a 1998 project offering advisory services, such as due diligence, legal advice and community mobilization, to communities and private sector parties to develop wildlife businesses in biodiversity-rich areas. This project was launched as AWF realized that the contracts between the communities and the private entrepreneurs who engaged in tourism activities on communal land were skewed, favoring the market parties.
Although the initial idea was that of private sector parties (and communities) having to pay for such consultancy services, this idea was not effectuated because donors made money available for this brokerage work between private sector parties and communities. More specifically, USAID started the CORE program (Conservation of Resources through Enterprises) in 1999 to promote enterprise development as a viable mechanism to generate a direct flow of benefits to communities. AWF was again one of the main subcontractors, and the project ran up to 2005. Against the backdrop of this enterprise-based approach to conservation within the CORE project, AWF adopted a landscape-level approach to conservation. It defined ‘Heartlands’, such as Samburu, Kilimanjaro and Maasai Steppe, with the intent to “[augment] protected areas and [help] to manage the surrounding areas, considering the needs of native species, ecosystem processes and local stakeholders” (Henson et al. 2009: 508). Conservation enterprises became one of the strategic interventions in these landscapes to provide economic benefits to communities and protect wildlife. In 2000, AWF formally embedded the conservation enterprise approach within its organization by appointing a new director in charge of the advisory services for enterprise development. The Koija Starbeds lodge (see Chap. 12, this volume) is an example of an enterprise developed under CORE and brokered by AWF (see also Elliott and Sumba 2010; Lamers et al. 2014; Nthiga et al. 2011).
In the mid-2000s, AWF’s enterprise program had crystallized and the approach was exported to other Heartlands in Africa as well as to other sectors, such as agriculture, livestock, non-timber forestry and fisheries. AWF had learned that tourism is not always a suitable strategy to generate a sufficient flow of benefits to communities of over 5,000 people. Moreover, not every area is attractive or suitable for tourism. While the enterprise approach has now become mainstream among conservation organizations in Kenya, AWF is considered the pioneer in developing this approach. Supported by different donors, it started to share its rich experiential knowledge in enterprise work by developing toolkits (e.g. AWF 2011) and to standardize its practices. In 2011, it also launched the African Wildlife Capital, a social impact investment company. This company is involved in financing small and medium-sized enterprises that can create positive conservation benefits.
By standardizing and professionalizing the enterprise work and launching an investment company to tap into the growing market of social venture capital, AWF aims to speed up the launch of CEs necessary to ‘reach scale’ (i.e. generate flows of benefits to the extent that these will alter the behavior of communities in favor of wildlife conservation). The launch of AWF’s investment company illustrates how the market-based approach to conservation has gained a solid footing in AWF’s work. This development aligns with the global discourse on business partnerships (promoted at the Johannesburg 2002 Summit) and the emergence of the social impact investment movement (O’Donohoe et al. 2010).
11.3 The Main Features of AWF’s Conservation Enterprise Model
AWF (2011, preface) describes CEs as businesses “designed to provide incentives (primarily through monetary and non-monetary benefit flows) for communities and landowners to conserve wildlife on their land, without targeting specific individuals within a community”. Another description is found in the same document, stating that CEs are about “creating businesses that are profitable enough to support communities adjacent to wildlife areas and foster a conservation ethic” (AWF 2011: 3). CEs thus are established to generate flows of benefits from wildlife to communities and thereby to alter the community’s perceptions of wildlife, getting them to see wildlife not as a nuisance or threat to their livelihood, but as an asset from which benefits may be derived. In addition to single enterprises, such as eco-lodges, bio-enterprises in honey and handicraft shops, CEs may also refer to value chain interventions. For instance, in 2004, AWF launched a sustainable coffee project with the Starbucks Company. The project provided smallholder coffee farmers with training and techniques to improve their coffee-growing practices and helped them to gain access to markets, in order to, amongst others, combat deforestation for agricultural land and secure an elephant corridor (AWF 2011).
This section details the main features of the CE approach of AWF, using TCEs as a point of reference (see Table 11.2). We draw on our interviews and on the AWF’s toolkit (2011), which describes in detail how to start up a CE project, get a deal signed, open a CE for business and make it perform successfully.
Table 11.2
Main features of the institutional arrangement of tourism conservation enterprises
Feature | Description | |
|---|---|---|
Main focus | Conservation on landscape level by increasing conservation incentives for landowners through tourism | |
Actors involved and their roles | Communal land owners | Owners of land on which conservation areas are created and on which lodges have been built and from which livestock is to be excluded in order to attract wildlife for photographic tourism |
Private entrepreneurs | Manage the lodge in terms of daily operations, marketing, sales and product development | |
NGOs | Broker, arbitrator and expert in conservation | |
Donors | Finance the community mobilization phase and co-finance the construction of lodges and the transfer of immovable assets to the community | |
Legal entity | Joint venture or partnership based on formal contract | |
Ownership | Community | |
Management | Private sector party | |
Sources of finance | Transfer of immovable assets occurs through different funding mechanisms (e.g. donor and grant funding matched with social impact investments, social venture capital, equity shares and loans). Such funding is leveraged with private capital of the private entrepreneur | |
Contribution to conservation | By securing land as conservation area, the amount of land available for conservation increases. By strategically selecting the location for such conservation areas, corridors between already protected areas can be created, allowing for landscape-level conservation | |
Contribution to livelihood | People’s livelihoods are improved, among other things, by the receipt of various types of fees (e.g. bed-night fees, conservation fees and facility lease fees); direct employment and local procurement opportunities; and the construction of health clinics and schools. Next to such tangible benefits, intangible benefits, such as increased security and empowerment, are important positive social impacts of tourism conservation enterprises | |
“Conservation enterprises are, above all, businesses” (AWF 2011: 47). Yet, the launch of a CE needs to be justified from a conservation point of view. For instance, the threatened mountain gorillas in Uganda were the rationale for launching TCEs in this country (Ahebwa et al. 2012). The main focus of CEs, thus, is biodiversity conservation.
In a TCE, such as an eco-lodge, the actors involved are the (communal) landowners, the operator/manager of the venture, and a trusted third party. First, communities (i.e. organized in group ranches in Kenya) are involved as owners of the land on which the lodge is built. Given the conservation rationale, such communal land is potentially rich in biodiversity and has been identified as land that is critical to connecting protected areas, such as buffer zones or corridors for wildlife migration. Communities set aside land for the construction of this lodge and declare this land a conservation area, thus excluding livestock grazing and other wildlife unfriendly behavior, such as poaching and charcoal burning. In most jurisdictions, legal ownership of land and buildings cannot be separated (AWF 2011). Hence, ownership of these lodges is vested in the community through different funding mechanisms, such as donor funding. In order to compensate the community for the opportunity costs of conserving the land involved and to provide them with an economic incentive to respect the conservation agreement, lodge revenues are shared with the community through payment of various types of fees. The second party involved in a TCE is a private sector party. This party is responsible for running the TCE as a sound business. Management, marketing and sales, and product development reside with the private sector party, because most communities lack the required business skills and capacity to perform such activities. The third party involved often is an NGO that helps to prepare and establish a deal between communal landowners and the private sector party. More specifically, AWF offers “facilitating services in due diligence and business planning, identifying private sector partners, legal contracting, community mobilization, and raising capital” (AWF 2011, preface). AWF not only performs the role of “honest broker” to arrive at fair business deals, but also that of “interim arbitrator” (AWF 2011: 42) in case these deals become contested. It should be noted that, once a partnership deal has been closed, it is governed by a specifically created trust. For instance, the Kijabe Conservation Trust (see Chap. 12