Recent research published from Botswana has highlighted what most conservationists have suspected for many years: when building interventions for community-based conservation efforts, these activities will be more effective if strong consultation and buy-in is done with the relevant communities and stakeholders. This has always been our approach with our newest programme – Communities for Conservation. Knowing the vital importance our target villages have in the key wildlife areas they are located, CCB has been involved with these communities for almost a decade. Excitingly, more and more organisations are realizing the importance of these vast wildlife areas and are coming on board to help foster coexistence and sustainable conservation in these areas. Using our newly developed Human Wildlife Conflict Strategy for the region, we have been able to join forces to facilitate real, sustainable change. But with so many new stakeholders and so many exciting new activities on the cards, it’s been important for us to continue to engage with the villages in question to bounce ideas and see where their priorities lie. 
 
At the end of March, our teams met up with stakeholders from relevant organisations and community members in the villages of Bere and Kacgae to discuss the ways forward with our upcoming activities and partnerships. In the pipeline for this year, we will be facilitating a natural and cultural resource review with Kalahari Wildlands Trust to help us pave the way for numerous sustainable resource projects. This will enable locals to benefit from natural resources, such as veld products, and cultural tourism developments, such as camp sites, and providing San cultural tours and experiences. We’re also teaming up with Kalahari Wildlands Trust to bolster craft development in the area; and during these recent meetings we were able to get local women signed up for the skills-sharing workshops that will be held in the next few months. 
 
Another exciting development for the area is a partnership between CCB and the Lion Recovery Fund, which has provided the funding for us to trial a Conservation Performance Payment pilot study for the region, which is prone to human-lion conflict. The new system will monitor wildlife numbers in the area around settlements and reward communities when wildlife numbers are maintained, livestock movements controlled and for the location of cheetah marking trees or wild dog denning sites. This concept rewards environmental conservation through positive reinforcement, giving community members incentives to coexist with carnivores and to minimize environmentally-damaging practices, such as poaching or overgrazing livestock in these Wildlife Management Areas.
 
After our extensive meetings with the communities last month, they are as excited as we are to be mapping such a positive and sustainable way forward for the people of the western Kalahari. We know that with their support and commitment to protecting these wild places, cheetahs, lions and other wildlife can flourish in this important wildlife area.

For over a decade, CCB has been championing local, Tswana landrace dogs as livestock guarding dogs (LGDs) in Botswana. After ten years of intensive studying, we have produced two scientific papers that show just how effective these tenacious little pups are at protecting livestock herds and reducing human-wildlife conflict. Data from our first study of 200 LGDs being used in Botswana showed that Tswana LGDs were cheaper and better behaved than their purebred counterparts and could save a farmer on average $1,300 every year in the livestock losses they prevented. Data from the 81 Tswana LGDs placed by CCB’s placement programme since 2013 was even more impressive. Farmers that received LGDs from us experienced at least an 85% reduction in livestock losses.  Furthermore, these LGDs helped to improve the attitudes of farmers towards carnivores like cheetahs within only a year of the LGDs being placed on their farms. With retaliatory killings of cheetahs by disgruntled livestock farmers being one of the biggest threats to their survival in southern Africa, this data has huge ramifications for cheetahs and other large carnivores’ conservation in the region, and beyond. 
 
The concept of using local dogs instead of imported breeds could be implemented in any rural farming communities the world over. Local landrace dogs are usually hardier, generally more adept at avoiding local dangers, such as snakes, and more resilient to local diseases and parasites and therefore usually live longer lives. This combination means that not only are landrace dogs (if present in an area) more readily available but they are also an affordable and effective choice of livestock guarding dog as they tend to be a cheaper alternative to imported purebreds. For many years, CCB has been promoting landrace dogs as alternatives, yet some farmers were still reluctant to try this technique. With a glutton of data to now show how positive an impact they can have on farms, with minimal financial outlay, these brave little dogs are now getting the recognition that they deserve. They say that every dog has its day, and for the understated Tswana dogs, today is definitely their day. 

On the 11th April 2021, the Kalahari lost one of its greatest icons. Master tracker Horekhwe Pro Langwane (also known as “Karoha”) was not only an expert tracker, traditional doctor and one of Botswana’s last “runners”, but a valued wildlife expert who we worked with on numerous occasions at Cheetah Conservation Botswana. As one of only three remaining “Master Trackers” in Botswana — a title given only to the most exceptional trackers — he provided incredible knowledge and skill when it came to our work in tracking carnivores through the Kalahari landscape. Most recently, his intensive work surveying the Western Kalahari Conservation Corridor with our PhD candidate, Marie-Charlotte Gielen, has helped build the science of how wildlife and communities share the land in Botswana’s Wildlife Management Areas. In 2017, Karoha came on board with CCB’s Education team to lead tracking workshops with students attending mobile bush camps in the village of Kacgae, teaching them how to track spoor (footprints) in the thick Kalahari sand, how to age tracks and how to identify edible foods in the bush. 
 
As one of the first San trackers to ever use the Cybertracker software, he was able to gather countless data for wildlife surveys and through this work co-authored several scientific papers. 
 
One disappearing tradition of the Kalahari San is the “persistence hunting” that the San used to hunt food for their families. This unbelievable technique saw “runners” spend hours at a time running down antelope until the animal would collapse with exhaustion. Karoha can be seen using this traditional technique in this video, made for David Attenborough’s Life of Mammals series in 2002.
​https://cybertracker.org/persistence-hunting-attenborough?fbclid=IwAR3SvYIlk1SaKjD263ujeevZ_ar1AxicVhTEqZlnoeSyyrXWPlNEq-D8jNA
 
We have long worried that the unfathomable traditional knowledge of the Kalahari San is disappearing with modernization and the loss of their nomadic lifestyle. As one of the last Master trackers of Botswana, we will mourn both the loss of Karoha and his ever-present smile but also the incredible knowledge, stories and skills that he takes with him. We are so thankful for his joyful spirit, his hard work, his passion for the bush and for having worked with us to pass on his invaluable knowledge on to the next generation of conservationists. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his friends, family and loved ones, both far and wide. 
 
“I had the great honor to work with Karoha for three years during my spoor surveys. He was a very cheerful person, always up for a laugh, and had an immense knowledge to share. It is a very sad loss for all of us personally who knew him, and for the world as well as this knowledge is disappearing with him.” – Marie-Charlotte Gielen 

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 CBOs 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 great 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 course still happen as we wait for the past paradigm to fade away. But I feel we are certainly on the trajectory to 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 adaptive to overcome 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 if land use developments proceed with a view to ensuring key spaces for wildlife. The communities value their wildlife resources although they 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, in race relations, and for all living things. We must all use that superpower to ensure that the next generation is compassionate, inclusive and empowered to create a better future for our world.