Parks for people

South African National Parks (SANParks) has embarked on a focused, multi-faceted campaign to draw people from all walks of life into conservation. The driving force behind the campaign is a new division at SANParks called the directorate of people and conservation.

Razeena Wagiet, an old hand at community-based education and former environment adviser to Education Minister Kader Asmal, was appointed in July to head the directorate of people and conservation and to take the programme forward.

Wagiet says the McKinsey report, a thorough audit of SANParks undertaken by United States consultants, recommended that the organisation should focus on broad-based constituency building. ‘The future of conservation lies in the hands of people,” she says. ‘If people don’t take responsibility for conservation, it has no future.

‘The old models involving conservation islands, fences and fines are no longer appropriate. Sustainable development has shown that we need to focus on the social facets as well.” The directorate of people and conservation is expanding on the social ecology, community empowerment and awareness-raising programmes that SANParks has been running for years.

‘We want to entice more South Africans to come to our parks and to build a base for future black conservationists,” says Wagiet. ‘We need to tap in to the 78% of black South Africans who are not visiting the parks.”

The social ecology unit looks at social issues relating to neighbouring communities living adjacent to national parks. Its focus areas include environmental education, cultural resource management and youth programmes.

National parks around the country offer a variety of educational programmes to schools, communities and visitors. Aims include encouraging visitors to return, helping local communities to understand, appreciate and support the conservation work of SANParks, and providing ‘outdoor classrooms” for learners. ‘We will be establishing more links with formal education, particularly as curriculum 2005 will be extending into some of the national parks,” says Wagiet.

A popular initiative of the social ecology unit is the Morula Kids competition, which invites entries from children in grades one to seven. They are asked a question – for example, last year it was, ‘What does a national park mean to you?” – and use their creative skills in the form of art, sculptures, poems and songs to respond.

In the past two years, more than 700 schools nationally have participated. Winners are treated to a visit to a national park near their school.

A partnership with the Wilderness Foundation sees youngsters visiting national parks for a four-day wilderness camp. This Imbewu Youth Programme targets youths between the ages of 15 and 23 who come from both township and rural areas.

In the past year, 759 young people participated in the Imbewu programme. In order to ensure that SANParks does not lose touch with these young people after the camps, a junior honorary rangers course was developed.

Another educational project sees SANParks and the Gauteng department of education teaming up to give learners in Gauteng schools access to national parks. Aims include exposing children to career opportunities, introducing indigenous knowledge to the school curriculum, inculcating an understanding of the environment and introducing the national parks system to tomorrow’s leaders.

Parks Empowering People

SANParks is channelling government poverty relief funds through national parks to the ‘poorest of the poor” by means of biodiversity protection, ecotourism development and infrastructure initiatives. Because neighbouring communities are the direct beneficiaries of this ‘Parks Empowering People” programme, it is not only achieving government poverty alleviation objectives but is creating goodwill for parks.

‘SANParks believes that national parks can be used as platforms for development in rural areas,” says Paul Daphne, head of the programme. ‘There are high levels of unemployment in the communities surrounding parks, and limited involvement of communities in park issues.

‘SANParks would like to see involvement from the surrounding communities in eco-tourism ventures and thus introduce historically disadvantaged communities into mainstream nature-based tourism and its benefits.”

The objectives of Parks Empowering People include providing employment for neighbouring communities and improving their quality of life; developing economic benefits by training people and creating SMMEs (small, micro and medium enterprises); enhancing the tourism potential of national parks through the upgrade and/or creation of tourism infrastructure; and improving area integrity by addressing biodiversity aspects in national parks.

SANParks became involved with the poverty relief programme funded by the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism during 2000/1, when only a few small projects were implemented. This was followed by an allocation of R50-million in poverty relief funding to several projects in Addo Elephant National Park.

In October 2001 SANParks made a presentation to the department with a strong motivation for several projects in other national parks, and during December 2001 an amount of R199-million was approved to implement 44 projects in nine other national parks.

The Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism is one of the government departments that received public funds from State Treasury for the implementation of a poverty relief programme. Critical focus areas of the department for the current three-year cycle (2002-2004) are: