Africa Needs to Make Conservation a Growth Industry
Photo Credit: An unidentified worker at Linyanti Bush Camp on the border of Botswana’s Chobe National Park. As part of African Bush Camps, Linyanti donates profits from safaris to local communities. Through its foundation, it also supports health care initiatives and local schools. African Bush Camps
Skift Take
If leaders continue to look at African conservation as a charitable cause, it is doomed. As a growth industry — yes, an industry — that creates jobs and economic mobility, there is still hope for a sustainable future driven by the very young population on the continent.
On Experience
Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. You can read all of his writing here.
Conservation is a vast topic, and it can often slide into abstraction. With the escalating, urgent crises of the world, some of the slower-burn existential issues can slide out of the news cycle. But it's vitally important. Michael Lorentz, a private safari guide, told me that with the pace of Africa’s population growth, if nothing changes and leaders do not create new forms of African-centric solutions, it will ultimately be futile — "Like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."
The dangers to wildlife are well-publicized. Poaching represents a profitable trade, especially in impoverished communities. There’s also the short-term economic benefit of forestry and selling off materials for profit. Illicit ivory trade bankrolls guerrilla armies and their weapons. As the population grows, there’s more demand domestically for items derived from natural resources, along with new trade relationships externally with other ravenous goods importers around the world. The short-term be
