Micro-Credit and Community Wildlife Management: Complementary Strategies to Improve Conservation Outcomes in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

Abstract

Community wildlife management programs in African protected areas aim to deliver livelihood and social benefits to local communities in order to bolster support for their conservation objectives. Most of these benefits are delivered at the community level. However, many local people are also seeking more individual or household-level livelihood benefits from community wildlife management programs because it is at this level that many of the costs of protected area conservation are borne. Because community wildlife management delivers few benefits at this level, support for their conservation objectives amongst local people often declines. The study investigated the implications of this for reducing poaching in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. Three community wildlife management initiatives undertaken by Park management were compared with regard to their capacity to deliver the individual and household-level benefits sought by local people: community conservation services, wildlife management areas and community conservation banks. Interviews were carried out with poachers and local people from four villages in the Western Serengeti including members of village conservation banks, as well as a number of key informants. The results suggest that community conservation banks could, as a complementary strategy to existing community wildlife management programs, potentially provide a more effective means of reducing poaching in African protected areas than community wildlife management programs alone.

Price Elasticity of Bushmeat Demand in the Greater Serengeti Ecosystem: Insights for Managing the Bushmeat Trade

“…Various interventions have been implemented to reduce bushmeat hunting in the SNP. These include strengthening law enforcement capacity and enhancing wildlife conservation awareness, promoting alternative protein and income sources (e.g., wage-earning activities), and providing veterinary care for domestic animals as well as community-level benefits including schools and health dispensaries (Moro et al, 2013(Moro et al, , 2015Rentsch and Damon, 2013;Kaaya and Chapman, 2017). Despite these interventions, bushmeat hunting persists and is expected to increase in the future (Rentsch and Packer, 2014) due to population growth and infrastructure development increasing market access (Dobson et al, 2010).…”

Roads and livelihood activity choices in the Greater Serengeti Ecosystem, Tanzania

“…The explanation may involve the generally low education level (88% of sample household members above 15 years of age had completed less than seven years of education) as well as low capacity for business development and entrepreneurship and financial constraints perceived as a barrier to further employment in occupations benefitting from reduced travel time to markets whether involving formal employment in district towns or MSMEs. Lack of skills is by community members perceived as a reason for low local employment in tourist camps in adjacent Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) [75] and our extended model with interactions showed a significant positive modifying effect of loan (that relaxes the financial constraint) on the preference for increased business and wage employment (Appendix H in S1 File). The observed high preference for more cropland and cattle may also influence the perceived availability of household labour for wage employment.…”

“…A considerable number of studies have focused on strategies to reduce illegal hunting and demand for bushmeat in the GSE. Research in western Serengeti concludes that community microcredit programs known as Community Conservation Banks (COCOBAs), providing household level incentives through loans to support the development of alternative livelihood strategies, with the requirement that loan group members abolish bushmeat hunting, has better potential to reduce bushmeat hunting than either TANAPAs Community Conservation Services (CCS) program or WMAs alone ([75], see also [50,77]). Another often suggested solution is improved law enforcement [78].…”

Aligning conservation efforts with resource use around protected areas

“…Most studies have examined impact evaluations of eco-development schemes and livelihood-focused interventions post-implementation and have found mismatches between outcomes and mandates and/or limited reach (Gubbi et al 2008;Macura et al 2016). There is evidence from around the Serengeti that in addition to communitylevel benefits, providing such household-level benefits are also important to reduce poaching pressures (Kaaya and Chapman 2017). In India, such programs reach approximately only 10% of all households of targeted villages around a tiger reserve (Macura et al 2016).…”

“…Interpreting such relationships would therefore be the first step in: (a) understanding the socio-economic and political contexts in which people living around forests are likely to reduce extractive pressures on forests, and (b) identifying socio-economically vulnerable groups with high reliance on natural resources that might be most vulnerable to resource use restrictions (Wright et al 2016) and/or who might benefit most from livelihood-focused interventions (Kaaya and Chapman 2017). Such poverty alleviation efforts and livelihood-focused interventions are implemented in many parts of Asia (Macura et al 2016), South America (Parry et al 2014), and Africa (Kaaya and Chapman 2017).…”