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Mahenye Conservation and Community Development Programme
31st October 2009

featured photo The Mahenye Communal Land is one of the first rural communities in Zimbabwe to embrace wildlife and tourism as a form of land-use within their area. Moved from their ancestral land in the 1960s to make way for the creation of the Gonarezhou National Park, the Shangaan community embraced poaching as a way of harvesting the resources from “their land”. After protracted conflict, a negotiated settlement brought sustainable hunting safaris into the community’s economic equation and later brought the development of two tourism lodges.

The envisaged ongoing development of a diverse, community economy based on the sustainable use of natural resources, in particular wildlife, has not happened because of the difficulties caused by the Zimbabwe economic and political circumstance. Tourism has all but gone along with most other options and opportunities. However, the Greater Limpopo Trans Frontier Conservation Area (GLTFCA) offers the possibility of regaining some of the lost ground. To do this, however, requires innovation and commitment by both the community and those who would help them find the means to change their circumstance.

The Leadwood Institute has proposed to the Mahenye Community that they commit to a project that will see a comprehensive land-use plan developed and implemented. The plan will have components of protected, irrigation agriculture to provide food security; an alternative livestock management system that will run alongside wildlife and also provide the means to introduce biogas production; both consumptive and eco-tourism operations; game ranching on land already set aside for the purpose; a carbon sequestration and ecosystem services management programme and a micro-enterprise project programme to support entrepreneurial women.

The first step has been taken with funding from United Kingdom-based Corporates For Crisis to initiate the micro-funding programme. Sindisa Foundation is providing the initial funds for training and is sourcing funding for the planning exercise and for the various components of the plan. The overall project is a pilot for a model that can be applied to all communities living on the borders of wildlife conservation areas.


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