Goals of the CBNRM program

The goals and policies of the CBNRM/ADMADE program arise from threats to wildlife and other natural resources in Zambia and to rural livelihoods in areas surrounding national parks.  (see Challenges)

Overall the program strives for a long-term, sustainable solution to problems suffered by communities due to underdevelopment, opportunity costs from living with large wild animals, and to economic losses due to poaching and poor community land use practices.  In seeking solutions to these problems,  the African College is helping communities become directly responsible for managing natural resources found on their land and developing new and legal ways that a more diversified use of natural resources can sustain to promote rural livelihoods.

Rural poverty and lack of food security contribute significantly to illegal hunting in protected areas.  By improving local capacity for investing wildlife revenues into appropriate activities, the CBNRM approach adopted by ADMADE hopes to increase food security and household income.

Until 1999, traditional rulers played a dominant leadership role in managing wildlife resources in their areas through ADMADE.  Now locally elected leaders have taken over that responsibility.  This has caused some conflict between traditional and democratically elected leadership governing community participation in wildlife management.  Through more frequent public meetings, improved training of both traditional and elected leaders, and periodic review and evaluation of CBNRM results by external ZAWA monitors, ADMADE is now harmonizing relations within the local leadership for a stronger community organization to support both conservation and rural development.

Lack of full transparency in the transfer of wildlife revenues to community accounts and use of these funds by community leaders is a threat to the success of Zambia's CBNRM program.  This threat is compounded by growing urban pressures for illegal trade in natural resource products.  The African College hopes to assuage this threat by providing increased technical assistance to improve leadership skills in managing wildlife revenues and facilitating improvements to current procedures used in remitting wildlife earnings to community accounts.  This is also helping strengthen community capacity to develop and manage budgets for both natural resource management and household livelihood benefits.

Lack of coordination among local NGO's to reinforce training efforts by the CBNRM program can lead to confusion in communities and low motivation to manage their wildlife resources.  By improving cooperation and communication between the African College and NGO partners community skills will improve and enhance  CBNRM chances of success.

Currently there is insufficient information to know why certain key wildlife species are decreasing in particular GMA's.  This decline effects community revenue earnings through sustained wildlife harvests by the commercial sector through hunting quotas.  Developing databases on wildlife populations by using approaches that local residents can use themselves will enable communities to identify population trends and be more inclined to identify the possible causes for population declines.  This will empower communities to develop management plans for effective prevention of species decline.

Communities need need policy support and recognition from their Government if they are to realize the full benefits of managing their wildlife.  Difficulty in disseminating CBNRM results and lessons-learned to high-level authorities for on-going policy reform and political support prevents this realization.  The African College hopes to improve Government support and recognition of CBNRM by developing a reliable process for communities to communicate their management results to key policy decision-makers.

There is a need for continued policy improvement to strengthen resource ownership rights by community authorities.  Ownership rights currently are weak and this reduces the level of  incentives needed for communities to be fully committed to managing their wildlife for increased production.  By promoting research and understanding policy needs by the Zambian government, the African College hopes to advance community-based resource management in Zambia.

Government recognizes the intrinsic strength of the ADMADE philosophy, which rests on the principle that wildlife has inherent economic advantages over other land uses in agriculturally  marginal regions of the country, and that realization of this potential can be a powerful incentive to use this resource in a sustainable way.  

ZAWA's mission also favors and encourages the distribution of wildlife revenue benefits to women's groups and other household-level groups, whose activities encourage conservation-oriented practices.  This will provide strong incentives for conserving the resource by linking benefits and resource conservation.

In helping support the ADMADE philosophy and the ZAWA mission, the African College for CBNRM has 

1. facilitated communities to develop their own constitution and by-laws to self-govern their CBNRM activities.  A community declaration of commitment to this constitution reads as follows:  (to see the full constitution click here)

We, the local residents, living on communal lands endowed with natural resources and serving our communities as elected ADMADE leaders, do declare our complete commitment and resolve to:

1. achieve total food security in our community and thereby remove the need for residents to destroy wildlife resources as a way of meeting food shortages,
2. provide economic alternatives for those people who represent the greatest threat and cost to our wildlife-based industries,
3. provide improved health care and thereby remove the need for large families that increase risks of malnutrition and poor education to our children,
4. develop the full economic potential of our wildlife resources through sound conservation and management practices,
5. keep community funds free of any fraudulent use and allow full transparency of their use for community development and resource management, and
6. show respect to our traditional rulers for continued harmony and cooperation in achieving an improved standard of living through the ADMADE program.

2. provided outreach training to household groups to acquire improved livelihood skills in food security and income generation.  In some areas, food security has improved ten-fold, resulting in a significant decline in illegal wire snaring of wildlife.  For the first time, households are now earning money from the sale of honey produced from their own bee hives, from vegetables grown on garden protected from wild animals by solar powered electric fencing, from cooking oil locally produced, and from other such small-scale businesses.
3. under-taken community awareness campaigns for how to undertake democratic elections of their CBNRM leaders and monitored the compliance of these procedures when communities elected their Community Resource Boards. 
4. developed community-driven methods for collecting, analyzing and using data for improving local resource management.  These methods are now widely used in Zambia and have proven to be effective for developing community-based land use plans, wildlife hunting quotas and determining wildlife population trends.

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