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A Himba woman and child gaze out across a mountainous desert.

RESPECTING RIGHTS, RESOURCES, AND LIVELIHOODS

Resource Africa supports rural African community efforts to secure their rights to access and use their natural resources in order to sustain their livelihoods. We help to build strong platforms for collaboration, knowledge and skills sharing among community-based organisations and other stakeholders across southern Africa and beyond. 

We believe that when rights are upheld and incentives for conservation are provided to those who live with wildlife there will be positive conservation outcomes benefitting people and nature. We therefore support joint advocacy initiatives to ensure community voices are heard on international platforms where decisions are made that materially affect their lives.

Empowered and motivated communities effectively exercising their rights to sustainably manage, benefit from, and conserve their natural resources.

To support southern African communities’ efforts to exercise their rights and enjoy thriving livelihoods by promoting global, regional, and national commitments and actions towards policy, market and legal reforms that secure local people’s rights to own, control and benefit from natural resources, especially land, wildlife, forests and water.

  • Human rights are central to our work, recognising their interdependence with the integrity of the natural environment.
  • Sustainable use of wildlife and ecosystems by communities and rural people is a basic human right recognised in both national and international law.
  • Addressing land and resource tenure, governance, enhanced livelihoods, gender equality, equity and empowerment as integral to our approach.

We focus on the following four pillars of community-led, people-centred conservation:

Man poling a mokoro (canoe).

Expanding Community Conservation

Two colourfully dressed women walk along a sandy beach. One has a basket of fruit on her head.

Building Local Capacity and Resilience

A woman in bright colours smiling, with a wooden fence in the background.

Amplifying Community Voices

An elephant looks up at a large green tree.

Creating Awareness of Rights to Resources