During the 2022 Tusk Conservation Symposium in Kenya, a Collaboration Grant of USD 2000 was awarded to the Africa Foundation – Oceans Without Borders (OWB) Programme and the Southern African Wildlife College (SAWC). This enabled participation in a knowledge exchange linked to OWB’s Community Conservation (C&C) monitor programme on Benguerra Island. Dr Tessa Hempson and Leo Gungulo (both from OWB) and Elna de Beer ( from SAWC) participated in the process that took place from 25 – 28 September 2022.
Based on the key findings and the development of the concept training plan, the team concludes that the knowledge exchange between OWB and SAWC achieved its purpose. It created opportunity for the two organisations to scope potential collaboration and agree on a concept to pursue for further and future collaboration.
Our way forward is to develop this concept training plan into a comprehensive training programme in collaboration with AP/BANP with the intent to implement as a collaborative project. This report submitted to TUSK will also be presented as feedback to the partner organisations who participated in the process.
Further to the above OWB and SAWC would like to initiate discussions with peers and interest group regarding the link between marine and terrestrial conservation with the purpose of identifying opportunities where projects bridging this gap can be pursued. To this effect SAWC has already started promoting the subject in their though leadership series on social media.
We would like to express our sincerest gratitude to Tusk for making the Collaboration Grant available. It created viable opportunities for OWB and SAWC to develop new and innovative avenues for collaboration in conservation.
