The turning point for Moreangels Mbizah came in 2014. The conservation biologist was in Hwange national park in Zimbabwe, scanning the savannah to monitor the movements of lions for her zoology PhD research.
The GPS signal told her something was wrong. One of the lions had strayed into a nearby village, putting itself and the local community at risk. Mbizah and her team took off to try to herd it back into its habitat.
Shouting and screaming echoed from the village as the team approached. When they arrived, it was a horror show. “We saw these people standing around a bush,” she says. “They were crying. We found that the lion had killed a young boy.”
The scene was chilling: about 30 villagers stood in a helpless standoff, watching the lion guard a seven-year-old’s body between its paws. The wildlife authority was called and killed the animal so the body of the boy could be retrieved.
“That was a punch in the gut,” Mbizah recalls. She had thought the best way to protect the dwindling lion population in her home country was to focus on the animals alone. “I realised that the work I’d been doing was just half of the problem.”
The experience led the scientist to form Wildlife Conservation Action (WCA), an organisation that puts the coexistence of people and animals at the centre of its work. Using novel techniques and technologies that have won Mbizah a Whitley award, WCA hopes to stem one of the biggest threats to biodiversity in Zimbabwe’s Mbire district: human-wildlife conflict (HWC).
Across Africa, lions have lost up to 90% of their historic range, with fewer than 20,000 remaining in the wild. As human populations expand and habitats shrink, lions increasingly move beyond protected areas in search of food, bringing them into direct conflict with people and their livestock.
For rural communities in Zimbabwe’s mid-Zambezi valley – a vast, biodiverse corridor linking Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique – wealth is measured in livestock. With a cow worth as much as $300 (£222) and a goat $30, the produce and value animals bring is central to survival when the average household income is $108 a month, says Mbizah. When livestock is killed by predators or crops trampled by elephants, the wild animal is often killed in retaliation. “In that case, we have losses on both sides,” she says. “People lose, wildlife loses – and that’s what HWC looks like.”
To combat the problem, the WCA developed community-led strategies for people to protect their livestock. One key pillar is community guardians, local people trained and employed to raise the alarm when GPS signals indicate predators are close. This allows communities to safeguard their herds, saving their prized assets and removing the threat to both sides.
“Our model is looking at how we can involve the communities, how we can inspire the communities, how we can motivate and incentivise them to protect the wildlife that they are living alongside,” says Mbizah.
One technological innovation is the mobile boma – a livestock enclosure wrapped in opaque plastic. “When the lion comes [to the village], it won’t see the cattle. They can smell them, they can hear them – but because they can’t see, they won’t attack. We have seen that these mobile bomas have been 100% effective in protecting livestock.”
The results have been striking. According to WCA, incidents of human-wildlife conflict have fallen by as much as 98% in Mbire. The organisation says its work now spans 2.6m hectares (6.4m acres) of the Zambezi valley, protecting nearly 18,000 livestock worth an estimated $2.3m.
Mbizah, 42, grew up in Chiredzi, a small town in south-east Zimbabwe. Growing up miles from the wildlife areas, her first exposure to such animals did not come until she was 25. She remembers it vividly. “Seeing the little impala jumping around the zebras, feeling like this was a place that I wanted to be and just feeling that strong connection to nature. That was the moment my career began.”
For many Zimbabweans, encounters with the country’s biodiversity are rare – and for black women, careers in conservation are rarer still. “It was very lonely,” she says of her breakthrough. “There was no black African woman who had founded a conservation organisation in Zimbabwe. It was something that I saw as a gap that needed to be filled.” Part of WCA’s work is its outreach programmes, offering young female African conservationists work experience and mentoring. “This has been my story, but it doesn’t have to be the story of everyone coming after me,” she says.
For Mbiza, the work has come full circle. In 2014, tracking lions during her PhD, she worked closely with Zimbabwe’s most famous big cat, Cecil the lion, whose death at the hands of an American trophy hunter sparked global outrage.
She still remembers getting the phone call telling her Cecil had died. “When you spend so much time with lions, you end up developing a bond with them. It was heartbreaking for me.”
She is determined not to relive the heartbreak she experienced with Cecil and witnessed in the village that lost a child, by finding ways for people and lions to coexist. “We are not going to be able to protect lions without protecting the people,” she says.
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