Winter is upon us in Botswana and we’re appealing to you, our friends, to consider donating to our winter drive. As you may know, CCB has partnered with Learn To Play to facilitate community playgroups focused on providing early childhood development to those children between the ages of 2 and 5, not already enrolled in existing pre-schools in the village of Kacgae in Western Botswana. The Kacage playgroup has performed impressively since its establishment in January 2020, delivered by a team of dedicated and selfless Mamapreneurs from the village itself, with six children successfully graduating to primary school at the end of 2020.
 
Your gift to this winter fundraising drive will help us provide healthy snacks for the playgroup students to keep them alert, engaged, and strong all year round. For $20 a day, we can feed 36 students for the entire year. While the playgroup feeds their minds, it’s a known fact that child nutrition is a concern in Botswana with almost 11% of children being underweight. Without enough energy to focus in class, this can set back all the efforts made. This is where you can help.
 
Our target for this campaign is $6,000.00 which will cover a year’s worth of healthy snack provision for the playgroup. This is in line with the sustainable development goals of Zero Hunger, Good Health, Quality Education, and Reduced Inequality. We are doing our part to shape a world fit for everyone, especially the youth. We know that strong and healthy communities help protect cheetahs and the other threatened species with which they share their wilderness home.
 
Donation details are available below. Sharing this video can also do wonders for our team’s awareness-raising efforts and help spread the message. Every little bit goes a long, long way – especially in these trying times. As always, we remain grateful for your support.
 
Re a leboga.

DIRECT ELECTRONIC BANK TRANSFER
Electronic transactions from your bank can be made to the following CCB account:
Bank name:  First National Bank
Branch no: 284567
Address: Kgale View Branch, Gaborone, Botswana
Account name: Cheetah Conservation Botswana
Account no: 62186015155
Swift code: FIRNBWGX

NORTH AMERICA
Donations in US dollars can be made through the Wildlife Conservation Network (WCN) and are tax deductible. Please send cheques payable to 'Wildlife Conservation Network' with direction that the donation is for Cheetah Conservation Botswana to:
Program Manager
Wildlife Conservation Network
209 Mississippi Street
San Francisco
CA 94107

Alternatively, you can donate to CCB online through the WCN website by clicking here.

​CCB recently facilitated a virtual community meeting between Xhwiskurusa Trust (as primary stakeholders) and several potential partners – showing adaptation to the impositions brought on by COVID-19 travel restrictions. This falls in line with our work as a member organisation of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) for the area. The TAC is a district body coordinated and facilitated by the Department of Wildlife and National Parks and is comprised of NGOs and government departments who give guidance on community-based natural resource management in the area around the villages of Kacgae, New Xade, East and West Hanahai. As a Community Based Organisation, Xwiskurusa Trust is mandated to prudently manage the natural and cultural resources of the GH10 Wildlife Management Area in the Ghanzi District on behalf of the communities in this area.
 
Through work like this on the ground, we are able to add value to how various communities in the Ghazi District map their development plans in line with our mutual goals and with their best interests at heart. We continue to encourage collaborative and informed decision-making within our partner communities’ leadership structures to help them explore and develop collaborative partnerships with other entities that can bring unique skills and expertise to the table. We look forward to seeing the positive impact from this project as time unfolds. Thank you to all the staff and stakeholders who made this meeting a success.

​This year we have experienced above-average rains over the entire Kalahari thanks to La Niña. On the back of last year’s drought, this was initially a welcome change. Unfortunately, when it rains, it pours, and farms around our field camp have received three times the average annual rainfall, and we still have a couple of months remaining in our wet season. The water table has been so inundated that we actually had fountains of water spurting up from the limestone rock in several areas on our farm — a sight none of us have ever seen before! 
 
Our camp was cut off from the nearest town due to flooding on the roads and even the Trans Kalahari Highway, which links our three sites, has been underwater for several weeks. Sadly, the torrential rain also flooded both our Education Centre and staff camp, causing approximately $4,000 in damage to buildings, roofs and equipment. This unusual flooding has also had impact on the local community. Local tourism operators in our area, barely afloat due to the pandemic, have now had to close their businesses because of the flooding, further exacerbating their financial woes.
 
We are worried that if these increasing effects of climate change continue, the flooding experienced will significantly kill off grass and plant life to the point where it may be equally as damaging as the drought. Thankfully our recent upgrades to the solar system at our camp have meant that we haven’t experienced any power outages despite the number of cloudy days. The Ghanzi camp staff are now looking forward to some rain-free days in which they can start the repairs to the damaged infrastructure.  

The pandemic has caused numerous challenges for all of our teams but none more than our Education team. When the Government schools reopened in June 2020 after a two-month closure over lockdown, they split classes in half and implemented a morning and afternoon session roster in order to meet social distancing requirements in their classrooms. This meant that teachers and students did not have time left in the day to allow us to visit and engage students on conservation. Thankfully, many of the private schools did not have this concern, with smaller class sizes meaning that they could continue with their regular class times. Thanks to the strict COVID protocols adhered to by these schools, we were able to safely visit Pioneer Academy and Matshwane International Schools in March this year to share our posters with them and to talk to the children about conservation. Under normal circumstances, we would engage with a large group of students all at once, but with assemblies cancelled and large groups disallowed, our Education staff went class to class for more intimate chats about wildlife in Botswana and why it’s all of our responsibility to protect the environment. Although the focus of these talks was to show students how leopards differ from cheetahs, the amazing questions from the students and stories about their interactions with wildlife allowed the sessions to adapt based on the children’s interests and needs. 
 
Speaking with children from Pioneer Academy in Ghanzi is always a particularly illuminating experience — as their farming community suffers greatly from human-wildlife conflict and these children have often been directly exposed to confrontations between large carnivores and farmers. On this particular visit, we heard many stories of farmers trapping cheetahs and leopards in cages before moving them off the farms in what we refer to as “translocation”. This allowed our team to discuss the pros and cons of this approach with students and help them to understand the value of protecting livestock from carnivores so that livestock are protected from all carnivores. We discussed livestock guarding dogs and corralling animals at night to prevent attacks, so that livestock and carnivores can share the same spaces without problems. Students who gave particularly inspired answers to questions received CCB stickers to take home with them — a particular favourite of all the students.
 
We’ve noted that engaging with children from farming communities has the ability to incite positive change in a few ways. Not only are we helping students to understand the incredible wildlife that Botswana has, but we’re helping cultivate a passion and a love for that wildlife. We are also helping to nurture the next generation of farmers, business owners and policy makers that have great respect and empathy for wildlife. More importantly, the lessons that they receive at school get taken home with them and get shared with their families. These are families that are living directly with large carnivores and whose actions are instrumental to the survival of these threatened species. Our hope is that the messages these students take home to their families help encourage farmers to take proactive measures to protect their livestock from predation rather than simply reacting to attacks once they’ve occurred. It is through these preventative measures, such as using livestock guarding dogs, that farmers in these areas are starting to experience real, long-term, positive change in the carnivore-livestock dynamics on their farms.