To commemorate International Women’s Day 2021, we had a conversation with our superstar conservationist Executive Director, Rebecca Klein, to hear her thoughts on the progress of women’s rights and how it has been for her to lead an organization that has strong representation of women in leadership.
 
The UN has launched the Generation Equality Forum - a civil society-centred gathering to promote gender equality, and the UN theme for Women's Day is "Women in Leadership - Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world on the way to Generation Equality Forum": what do you see as the role and responsibility of CBOs in achieving true equality?

Community based organizations have an instrumental role to play in ensuring gender equality is integrated into their programs. Often such organizations work in rural areas where the role of women may not be as diverse as in urban, more ‘modernized’ areas of society. It is up to CBO’s to investigate and appreciate the gender dynamics in communities and incorporate this into their approaches. In communities that CCB is working in we are focusing on women’s empowerment.

We are looking at the existing traditional skills and strengths such as childcare, production of crafts and harvesting of veld products and developing livelihood opportunities around these strengths. As well as incorporating new skills such as computer training to broaden the skills of women in the community and enable them to diversify into a wider range of income opportunities. It is also inspiring to see this approach coming from within the community itself. In recent community trust elections, the communities we work with chose to have equal representation from both women and men in their Board of Trustees, feeling it was essential to incorporate gender equality into their leadership.

For me, all this work seeks to celebrate the power of women's rights activism, feminist solidarity and youth leadership to achieve transformative change.

It’s great to see this kind of trickle down impact in spaces that are often framed as slow to change. As someone who inherited a world where the fight for gender equality was still young, and now raising someone in a world where we are still talking about fighting for gender equality, what gives you the most hope that an equal future can be achieved?

I suppose from a gender equality perspective I was lucky to be born in the U.K. when gender equality was already becoming the norm. I always felt that I had equal rights and the opportunity to have any future I set my mind to. My mother was also a very empowered individual who would protest and fight against any inequality. Her mother was an Austrian Jew who had escaped the holocaust of World War 2 and made her way to freedom alone, raising her 2 daughters without any family support. With such a history of overcoming adversity they never let anything get in their way and these strong women were my role models. When I was a child we left the UK and lived in Africa and Asia in countries where equality was certainly not the norm and the difference was clear. Women didn’t have the same practical opportunities as men and in some cases didn’t even have rights to education or the same levels of freedom. I realized that I was very lucky to be female and, in my culture, to have equal rights.
 
However, since that time, I have seen a huge amount of change and have seen women’s empowerment grow and come to the forefront of many political agendas in such countries. More countries than ever have women leaders and women in high positions in all industries. It is amazing to see the growth and change that has happened. Of course, this is not limited to women but also people with different gender identities. It is no longer acceptable to judge or discriminate people based on gender, although this does of cause still happen as we wait for the past paradigm to fade away. But I feel we are certainly on the trajectory for an equal future for all and gender equality is well on its way all over the world. There really is no stopping it now! 

Yes, the defiance and resistance against continuing suffering is emboldening. Women are often institutionally marginalized, yet you lead an organization that has a strong representation of different women with broad skills. How important is it to you that CCB not only shows that skilled women get the job done well, but that conservation across the country is understood as equal parts 'care' (often gendered as feminine) and hard work (often gendered as not feminine)?

CCB has a very strong female representation and that’s great to see. To be honest, this was not really intentional even though the organization was founded by women. Having gender equality at our core we didn’t select staff in anyway due to gender. It rather evolved that in many cases the right people for the different roles happened to be women! Of course, it is now a source of pride for us that women are so well represented in our organization. We are proud to able to demonstrate that the women in CCB are hardworking, strong, tough, resilient, brave and adapt at overcoming adversity.
 
Also, having said that, the men that balance our team also show their care and compassion on a regular basis! We have a progressive and inclusive team and everyone has important attributes they bring to the organization.

What inspires you most about the present state of cheetah conservation, then?

I’m inspired about the future of cheetah conservation as I see important progress happening over time. There is now a lot of attention around the world focused on the conservation of threatened species and views towards wildlife are changing slowly but surely. More and more they are seen as important assets for the future of our world. In Botswana we are in an ideal situation of having relatively low human populations and a government that values the presence of wildlife as an economic asset. There is still enough space for cheetahs and other wildlife if managed well and land use developments proceed with a view to ensuring key spaces for wildlife. The communities value their wildlife resources although may need support to realize their long-term economic benefits through various programs.
 
That’s so true that we need the systems to be in service of the existing recognition of the value of wildlife in our collective lives. So, as your closing remarks in observance of this year's women's day, we’d like to know what you would like other women to do in order to secure a strong future for cheetah conservation?

I would like to ask other women to spread the word of conservation, we are great communicators and we are often the primary carers of the next generation. My mother raised me to believe in equality for women but also for all living creatures who we share the planet with. This was an ethos which came to me at a young age and was strongly integrated into my being and shaped my future. Women have the power to influence our young people with this ethic of equality for gender, for race, for all living things. We must all use that super power to ensure the next generation is compassionate, inclusive and empowered to create a better future for our world.

CCB has long promoted the use of local livestock guarding dogs (LGDs) as effective tools to reduce human-wildlife conflict. Now, thanks to the hard work of our staff, we now have a decade’s worth of work in the field and extensive research published in two new exciting scientific papers in the Journal of Vertebrate Biology. 
 
The first paper, “Every dog has its day”, looks at how LGDs are used by farmers in Botswana and includes the first ever comparison between local “Tswana” dogs and imported breeds such as Anatolian Shepherds. This paper highlights that Tswana dogs are not only a more accessible and cheaper breed to use for livestock guarding but that they are just as effective and are even more well-behaved than Anatolian Shepherds. 
 
The second paper, “Reducing livestock-carnivore conflict on rural farms using local LGDs” focuses in on our placement program and tracks the effectiveness of Tswana dogs that have been trained at our facility before being placed with farmers with high levels of conflict. These results show that farmers experienced at least an 85% reduction in livestock losses after receiving one of our LGDs and that their attitudes towards wildlife improved only one year after receiving a LGD.  
 
These research papers add to the wealth of knowledge produced by CCB for the benefit of shaping programmes such as our very own LGD programme that continues to receive great reviews from farmers and noteworthy support from our partners. We expect that scholars, researchers and practitioners will engage with this research to establish best practices. These papers, and more resources are available on our website. 
 
To read the articles, follow these links:
 
Horgan, J.E., Van der Weyde, L.K., Comley, J., Klein, R., Parker, D.M., 2021. “Every dog has its day: indigenous Tswana dogs are more practical livestock guardians in an arid African savanna compared with their expatriate cousins.” 

Van der Weyde, L., Kokole, M., Modise, C., Mbinda, B., Seele, P., Klein, R., 2020. “Reducing livestock-carnivore conflict on rural farms using local livestock guarding dogs.”

​Last month our research team took down the 132 motion-activated cameras that they had placed out across the Ghanzi commercial ranches as part of a long-term wildlife monitoring exercise. The cameras, which are placed out for three consecutive months every year, monitor changes in wildlife numbers and distribution, and give us a good indication as to whether cheetah populations in the area are increasing, decreasing or stable and also gives us information about other carnivore presences and their prey. For this study alone, the research team retrieved a staggering 1.5 million photos to analyse for the study, to add to the few hundred thousand photos that they already accumulated this year through monitoring of farms and other studies on cheetah behaviour and ecology. Thankfully, help has arrived in the form of newly-developed AI technology and through a new development in photo analysis software, we have sent the photos to the Wageningen University in the Netherlands to trial their automated photo-analysis software. If successful, this approach could save our research team many long and arduous months of manual analysis and can free them up to conduct more on the ground work. Our partnership with the Wageningen University was born out of the acceptance of our Research Coordinator, Michelle Kral, as a PhD candidate. Michelle is working with the university while heading up CCB’s research team, taking a deep dive into conflict with cheetahs in the Kalahari and looking at how habitat and ecology impacts cheetah behaviour and the farmers they live alongside. We are incredibly thankful to the team at Wageningen University for their support and help with our camera trap photo analysis and we wish Michelle all the best of luck in her PhD work. 

​It is hard times like this when it is good to reflect on those special moments that have meant a lot to us. Looking back at these happy memories reminds us of the incredible job we have protecting cheetahs and they help us to get through tough times like these. Here we share with you the happiest moments from our Research Officer, Chris Mbisana and our Education Officer, Goabaone Britz Malepe. 

​Chris
“One morning in 2016, I was with my colleague, Emma, on our way to a farm to check camera traps that we had placed at a cheetah marking tree.  As we walked towards the cheetah marking tree, I saw something lying under a tree not far us. I was about to ask Emma if she could see it, when the animal lifted its head up and I realised it was a cheetah. Not only one, but two of them, lying there in the shade of the tree. When they saw us, they quickly fled the scene, as only cheetahs can do best. The greatest thing was that the two cheetahs were Clyde and Leigh — a coalition of two males which we saw regularly on our camera traps and whom we had collared two years prior. It was at that moment that I started believing that these animals really existed in these farms, surrounded by so much livestock and so many people.

​Britz
My happiest moment at CCB was when I was giving out prizes to students for an essay writing competition CCB had organized for primary school students in the Ghanzi district. It was in November 2018 — a week before the schools closed. I was already happy with my previous encounters with the other winners that I had handed prizes to in the days before. It had already left a good impression with me and I was feeling happy and was looking forward to meeting that last winner. Her name was Theo Gaditlhatlhelwe — a Grade 6 student from Kalkfontein Primary School. She was called to the staff room to come and get her prize, and from the moment she entered, I could see that she was very sharp and had an air of authority about her. When chatting with her about the prizes she had won, I found her to be very articulate, intelligent and confident. Her teachers also had nothing but praise for the young student. Then I learnt from her teachers that her mother was blind and that they were very close. I knew that the e-book reader I had just given her as a prize was exciting for her and this made her incredibly proud of her achievement. From that moment on, I started looking at my work through the eyes of the children that we worked with. Determined that no matter how seemingly insignificant, our work with those children had long-lasting impacts that no one could erase.