Out of Africa: the fight to protect wildlife as Trump's foreign aid cuts start to bite

Six months on from the US president's controversial order to halt all assistance, Nick Ferris explores how badly wildlife conservation programmes have been impacted – and how they have managed to keep operations going against the odds

- Nick Ferris

Zambia’s Lower Zambezi National Park has faced more than its fair share of problems since it first opened in 1983.

Lying next to porous borders with Mozambique and Zimbabwe, the park - which spans more than 1,000 square miles - became a hub for illegal activities such as trophy poaching, bushmeat poaching, illegal mining of gold, and unregulated fishing along the Zambezi River.

With cases of human-wildlife conflict rising, and gunshots heard across the park most nights, in 1994, groups including safari operators and local communities around the park established the charity Conservation Lower Zambezi (CLZ) to help government authorities protect the Lower Zambezi National Park, which is home to an abundance of wildlife including lions, leopards, more than 400 different kinds of bird species, and numerous other endangered species.

Today, CLZ has a team of 100 who work 365 days a year to protect the park. More than half of those employees are scouts from the local communities that work alongside government rangers on patrols of up to two weeks at a time, following tracks or tip-offs as part of regular, canine, aerial, or marine units. Whether it’s by sniffing out bushmeat from the villages that surround the park, removing poachers’ snares, or scouting out signs of illegal mining, CLZ’s work ensures the park is both a safe haven for wildlife and a key economic asset for Zambia.

But decades of hard-won progress are now under direct threat from cuts to US overseas aid. Specifically, frozen financing from the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has left a $900,000 (£680,000) hole in CLZ’s finances over the next four years. The past few months have left the charity “scrambling” to fill gaps where they can, says fundraising manager Frances Hannah, including by cutting the number of patrols it carries out and reducing activities in other programme areas.