One Health for Shangaan and The Place of Elephants

The Mahenye community-based conservation programme  is one of the few examples illustrating the way forward for the new set of targets for biodiversity conservation agreed at the Montreal-Kunming conference last December. It was agreed that “at least 30% of terrestrial, inland water, and of coastal and marine areas” were to be conserved by 2030, but more importantly, it also provided a timely recognition of local communities’ leading and  fundamental roles that  they have always played in biodiversity conservation.

The Mahenye One Health programme is a critical component of the whole biodiversity agenda by improving women and their families’ nutrition but by also generating revenues for women. There are currently two nutrition gardens which have now been established but one of them is still missing solar panels for the water pump to be operational, meaning women have to do it all manually with hand pumps and buckets. We need you renewed support to make sure we can improve women’s lives and nutrition, which in turn will help conserving one of the last elephants’ stronghold in Africa.