Challenges for the CBNRM program

Rising human numbers in a CBNRM area places increased pressure on finite resources. 

Autocratic, unaccountable leadership destroys household commitment to CBNRM goals.

 Many challenges exist in order for CBNRM to succeed

Poor education and skills development reduces opportunities to profit from and sustain resources.

Policies that deny communities full economic incentives to produce resources will threaten CBNRM success.

Environmental degradation on communal lands often occurs when human pressures exceed resource use limitations.  Good community leadership, sound CBNRM policies, household skills to reduce poverty and hunger, and strong community links with legal markets are recognized by the African College for CBNRM as key challenges for reducing these pressures.  How the College addresses them and what results the College has achieved are summarized below. 

Community Development:

Community life is the very fabric and soul for people living in Zambia's rural areas, particularly in large areas capable of supporting wildlife.  Likewise, problems affecting an individual's standard of living, whether they be food security, clean water, education, or health care, are often experienced as a community.  Poverty and hunger are the two most critical areas which adversely affect communities in their ability and/or desire to preserve wildlife.

 
Challenge: to alleviate Poverty--- Do communities have the technical skills to increase their income and the capacity to apply those skills?

Problem: No, communities lack the necessary skills to develop and diversify their income base.

Facts:

Household annual income in many communities is less than $140

20-50 % of community members are unable to afford basic medical care, which limits access to family planning and disease prevention products
20-30 % of children in rural areas fail to complete primary school due to lack of school fees

 

Challenge: to alleviate Hunger--- Do communities have the resources available to them to choose alternative methods for food security, thereby eliminating the need to snare and poach?
Problem: No, throughout much of Zambia's wildlife estate in rural areas food shortages are a common problem.  A common coping strategy villagers use is to snare or illegally hunt wildlife and to use the meat for barter to obtain food staples.   As many as 5000 animals per Game Management Area are killed annually this way. 

(To learn more about snaring click here)
Facts:
Lack of alternative livelihood strategies can lead to severe resource degradation.
Traditional values and practices, which previously helped to ensure sustainability of the natural habitat, become eroded under such pressures.
In many GMAs less than 6% of the land is arable.

The African College Response: 

Solutions to such community-wide problems as hunger and poverty are meant to serve the needs of all.  CBNRM is rooted in this understanding and promotes ways that households can express their needs through leadership structures that are democratic and participatory.  The College is helping communities build these types of institutions that support community-expressed needs through improved management of natural resources.  

Key to this process are CBNRM leadership structures that provide important venues of public discussion and decision-making to help involve all households in a community.

The African College facilitates community leaders to help households form livelihood groups.  The College assists this process by providing skills and improved understanding to group members on how to engage their leaders for assistance.  Examples of groups the College has assisted are farmers clubs, reformed poachers clubs, women's clubs (family health), fisherman's associations, and small business groups (beekeeping, vegetable growing, VAG owned grinding mills, women owned enterprises). 

bee-keeping group in Mwanya VAG

to see more photos click here 

The African College offers a number of courses (see courses) that enable communities to be more qualified in managing natural resources and developing legal markets from their use.  This requires repetitive training of capable people identified by their community and has resulted in remarkable achievements.  Such as:

community leaders in many GMA's employ their own Village Scouts to police their resources and collect useful data for improving management decisions

communities have Resource Management Committees able to set hunting quotas and estimate wildlife populations trends by using Village Scout data
Community Resource Boards have qualified people who can calculate income derived from legal wildlife uses, negotiate improved job relations with tourism operators, and help plan and budget for resource management plans. 

The Results:  Achievements for conservation

 
Financial incentives for communities to produce wildlife.  Poachers are employed as village scouts by Community Resource Boards and thus reduces poaching.  (see Job Creation)
Community skills in conservation and rural development.  In a growing number of communities, households have improved farming skills and are now more food secure. This is helping to reduce rates of snaring, or subsistence poaching, and to produce more wildlife for legal markets that are earning communities more income. (see Food Security)
Land use plans guiding community respect for  natural resources.  Community leaders are now better trained to use their own information and engage public meetings to help plan land uses. This is creating community support for reducing illegal or destructive use of natural resources as a long-term approach for diversifying future income opportunities. (see Land Use)
Wildlife numbers are responding to CBNRM efforts where community organization and leadership are promoting community-wide participation in the program.  By improving skills for community leaders to assess their own efforts in achieving improved livelihoods among local residents, communities are now better able to plan and find solutions to the root causes of poverty and food security.  This achievement is building a solid foundation for wildlife conservation in Zambia's Game Management Areas. (see Management Skills)

 

Wildlife Management:  

An important premise of CBNRM is that communities need to derive sufficient economic gain from wildlife to be motivated to manage and protect it.  This has proved very challenging in Zambia.  For one, policies still deny communities the full economic value of this resource, as much of the revenue collected is returned to Government authorities as opposed to the communities who help produce the resource.  In addition, communities lack many of the organizational, planning and technical skills that are needed to give them the "voice" to be qualified wildlife managers.  Achieving this capacity will not happen over-night, though it certainly needs to with many wildlife areas under severe threat of rural poverty.  The College is one of the few Institutions in the region qualified to help speed this process up with its holistic approach to resource management and its multi-talented team capable of working effectively with rural communities.  
Challenge: to benefit from wildlife--- Can communities earn income directly from their wildlife resources?

Do communities have the necessary skills to increase wildlife production and promote continued economic use of this resource?
Problem: Yes & No, communities are able to earn income but opportunities for doing so are severely constrained by skills in leadership, negotiating and planning as well as policy constraints that hinder the level of community involvement in negotiating wildlife business transactions.  Yet, much progress is being made and community leaders are showing determined efforts to increase their stake in this resource sector by taking on these constraints and working with Government as an effective partner in helping develop a profitable wildlife industry.  Still, there are many problems that remain obstacles: 
Facts:
Rapidly expanding human population with low income (poverty) and poor food security.
Urban center pressures on resources.
Lack of local awareness and understanding about ADMADE and environmental issues/problems.
Unsustainable resource use practices often aggravated by poverty.
Weak administrative and legal support structures

 
Challenge: to increase wildlife numbers--- Are communities able to protect their wildlife resources?

Do wildlife increases create sufficient profit incentives for communities to manage and protect wildlife?

Is the entire community involved?
Problem: No, prior to CBNRM, wildlife for many local residents represented a net loss to personal income because of property loss from wild animals.  Furthermore, wildlife revenues by-passed communities almost entirely.  Today, Zambia is making great effort to reverse these conditions.  As a result of ADMADE, approximately 35% of potential community income from wildlife is returned and a growing number of local residents are gaining employment to actively police and protect their wildlife. But this is not enough.  Community institutions capable of linking rural development to wildlife conservation need more skilled leaders, wildlife profit incentives are too low, and legal wildlife markets need to be diversified.  Unless these problems are overcome, CBNRM results may not  convince policy makers to remain committed to community-based approaches to managing wildlife.  If this were to happen, almost surely problems of inefficient law enforcement and destructive land use practices will continue to eat away at Zambia's wildlife estate.
Facts:
Snaring takes tens of thousands of animal lives each year
Many GMAs are experiencing significant losses of habitat from expanding farming activity, alternative incomes from competing land uses like charcoal making, and unplanned settlements
Illegal meat trafficking is becoming increasingly organized and sophisticated in Zambia and offers community residents a "quick fix" to poverty

The African College Response: 

Managing and supporting human numbers are constrained by arable land, growing population rates, poor food production practices, and inadequate service providers to deal with these problems.  In the Zambian case, these problems are very real but not beyond the reach of finding solutions.  To a large extent, these are the problems the College helps communities overcome that eventually lead to locally acceptable solutions.  In most cases, solutions require community-generated income to support household livelihood needs and to finance improved resource management.

Creating household income through legal, sustainable use of natural resources is limited by such constraints as access to markets and lack of skills needed to make people more employable or better able to generate personal income.  The College helps to link market opportunities with household groups and provides training to community leaders to facilitate such services themselves for improving local enterprises in their area.  The College recognizes that most communities lack basic accounting and business skills and have little if any experience in organizing themselves into small business groups.  For this reason, training of groups in such skills is a major focus to help reduce economic pressures for households to poach or degrade their natural resources.   

While livelihood skills may be an important long-term answer to wildlife conservation, law enforcement and self-policing by residents as a deterrent to illegal activities remain an important aspect of ADMADE and the skills the College provides.  From the revenues communities receive, elected leaders must budget a certain portion to ensure these costs and management requirements are maintained.  This is done through employment of village scouts, community supported land use plans, and improved vigilance by all community members.  Again, the College plays an active role in developing the skills needed to perform these duties and how leaders themselves can use community-collected data to self-appraise these efforts for making on-going improvements.

CBNRM gives communities a land use option that promotes wildlife conservation--a valued "cash crop" through legal commercial markets, such as tourism.
With the right skills and effective leadership, communities can increase wildlife production and profits with relatively little labor cost.
The African College is promoting community ownership of wildlife, technical skills to manage it, and improved ways to sustain income from this resource in Game Management Areas.

The Results:  Achievements for conservation

 
Apply local solutions and analyze results. As communities improve their capacity to plan projects that support household needs sustained from wildlife revenues, local leaders taught by the College are demonstrating how land use plans can resolve land use conflicts detrimental to wildlife. For example, a number of Community Resource Boards enforce controlled settlements and fishing camps along park boundaries to facilitate free movement of wildlife. (see Border Management)
Budget management needs and enforce financial controls.  Management planning often breaks down when leaders fail to adhere to budgets or agreed-to-timetables. This is a problem that requires transparency of financial records and improved monitoring and disclosure of management results to the public.  Such procedures are becoming more widely practiced as the level of skills improve and community members become more involved in ADMADE public meetings. (see Management Planning)
Key constraints to wildlife production become better understood through more direct consultations with households in the community.  This creates improved avenues for directing resource management skills.  Waterhole management, for example, is proving a critical determinant to wildlife numbers.  This is because Zambia has a long dry season and the few remaining waterholes having water in a wildlife area can be easy targets for disturbances such as snaring.  Through collective efforts by village communities residing near these waterholes, public action is leading to better controls of human access to waterholes.  This, in turn, is reducing potentially important causes of wildlife mortality. (see Waterhole Management)
Understanding human ecology in the context of how villages could be better planned and managed is an increasingly important theme used in the College's training curriculum.  For example, the College is actively promoting farming practices that allow household to more intensively use the same land for many more years than older methods of farming.  This is reducing the need to clear more land that may reduce wildlife habitat. Through its outreach training and research, the College has learned that chickens represent a major part of households' diet and personal income but that chicken diseases are responsible for major die-offs during late dry season months.  Low-costs vaccinations administered by trained residents is doubling survivorship rates of local chickens and reducing the need to snare wildlife.  (see Settlement Planning) 
Increased gender balance in community leadership structures is a major result of a more democratic leadership that the College has helped facilitate.  Chikwa and Chitungulu Units both have women CRB chairpersons, who were democratically elected by their respective communities.  For the first time in ADMADE's history, women voices are being heard and are providing important views in the decision-making process.  In many VAGs, women groups are developing and learning how to lobby their views at the VAG level.  This is  increasing the level of benefits that support women needs.  All of this is contributing to a more supportive community for improving resource management practices.

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