African Wildlife Foundation - Conservation

Protects Africa's majestic landscapes and unparalleled wildlife -- lions, mountain gorillas, rhinos, elephants -- through habitat conservation, species science, leadership training and conservation-based economic opportunities for Africans for the last 50 years.

Why do we exist?

African Wildlife Foundation, together with the people of Africa, works to ensure the wildlife and wild lands of Africa will endure forever. 

AWF is the longest-serving international conservation organization working solely in Africa. For fifty years AWF has fostered African-led approaches to building partnerships, as well as tools and capacity for conservation. AWF has over 125 staff—more than 85% are African citizens—working from a network of field offices throughout Africa and one support and fundraising office in Washington, DC. AWF is highly regarded for its Africa-centered philosophy and practical approach to conservation, as well as its strong capacity building and science base, for innovations in working with communities, and more recently, for its private-sector partnerships that leverage wildlife enterprise development and for strategic planning at the landscape level.

What have you accomplished?

The only way to conserve Africa’s wildlife is to manage Africa’s wild lands. Not small pockets of land, not even national-park-sized swaths of it, but vast landscapes that range for hundreds, even thousands, of miles.  All of Africa’s lands sustain life. But certain key landscapes are absolutely essential to conservation—thanks to their unmatched concentrations of wildlife and their potential to sustain viable populations for centuries to come. AWF has done the hard work of identifying those landscapes. They are the AWF African Heartlands.

Far larger than any park or reserve, an African Heartland combines national parks and local villages, government lands and private lands into a large, cohesive conservation landscape that often spans international borders. In an African Heartland, people and wildlife live side by side, and the needs of both are balanced. AWF works with stakeholders to design land conservation strategies, protect species through applied research and conservation efforts and empower people through training and economic development.

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