When African conservation crosses borders

At a quiet hotel in rain-soaked Maun, African policymakers, scientists and community voices came together to design a continental biodiversity programme rooted in shared ecosystems, resilience and cooperation

Maun, Botswana | RONALD MUSOKE | On the edge of the Okavango Delta,a where seasonal rains soften northern Botswana and the air carries the scent of wet grey earth, a quiet hotel in Maun became, for four days, the nerve centre of an ambitious continental conservation rethink.

Each morning, rain fell steadily over the town, feeding the same river systems and wetlands under discussion, as policymakers, scientists, conservation practitioners, financiers, community voices and regional institutions gathered at the Cresta Maun Hotel to do something Africa has often struggled to do collectively: design, from the ground up, a shared programme for managing ecosystems that refuse to respect national borders.

The meeting, formally titled the Regional Programme Design for Strengthening Transboundary Ecosystem Connectivity and Resilience in Africa, was convened by the African Union Commission (AUC) in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Regional Service Centre for Africa and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Its task was as political as it was technical; to co-create the architecture of a multi-country Biodiversity for Resilience (B4R) Programme capable of moving Africa beyond fragmented conservation projects towards an integrated, continent-wide strategy rooted in shared landscapes, shared risks and shared benefits.

What emerged from the four-day workshop was not merely a draft programme document. It was a candid, sometimes uncomfortable conversation about sovereignty, history, financing, power and the future of Africa’s nature, and, critically, about who gets to decide how that nature is valued, governed and protected.

Why borders fail ecosystems

Africa’s transboundary ecosystems that include; forests, savannahs, wetlands, rangelands and seascapes that straddle political boundaries, harbour some of the world’s most significant biodiversity. They also sustain the livelihoods of more than 200 million people. Yet these landscapes face escalating pressures from climate change, land degradation, deforestation, illegal wildlife trade, unsustainable land use and fragmented governance.

Rivers flow across borders, wildlife migrates, pastoralist routes predate modern states yet policies, budgets and institutions remain largely national and often uncoordinated.

In response, African member states, working through the African Union Commission, are developing a multi-country Biodiversity for Resilience Programme focused on strengthening transboundary ecosystem connectivity and resilience across ten priority landscapes. The ambition is captured in what participants repeatedly referred to as the “10–10–10-10 Vision”: ten landscapes, ten million hectares under conservation, and ten million people benefiting directly over the next 10 years.

The Maun workshop was designed to turn that vision into something operational. Participants were tasked with validating priority landscapes and selection criteria; identifying barriers and solutions; developing a regional theory of change and results framework; mapping the comparative advantages of partners; agreeing on programme architecture, roles and responsibilities; co-designing gender, youth and stakeholder engagement approaches; defining monitoring, evaluation and knowledge management pathways; and outlining sustainable financing mechanisms, including blended finance and nature-positive value chains.

By the end of the meeting, they had consolidated landscape design sheets, a programme-level theory of change, draft stakeholder engagement plans, financing strategies, partnerships matrices and a clear action roadmap; the scaffolding of what could become one of Africa’s most consequential conservation initiatives.

A continental mandate

Opening the workshop on Dec.15, Harsen Nyambe Nyambe, the Director for Sustainable Environment and Blue Economy at the African Union Commission, placed the discussions firmly within Africa’s political project.

“We are gathered here to develop a project proposal focused on building the resilience of biodiversity in Africa through transboundary landscape and ecosystem approaches,” he said. “This model is designed to foster cooperation, integration, coordination, and harmonization of efforts among neighbouring countries to enhance natural resource management.”

For the African Union Commission, Nyambe explained, transboundary conservation is not an optional technical tool but it is central to its mandate of policy harmonisation and collective African positioning in global environmental negotiations.

“One of our core mandates is to support member states in adopting international best practices for sustainable development,” he said. “We do this by promoting policy harmonization across the continent; an objective that can be greatly advanced through transboundary landscape approaches.”

He linked the Maun process to global frameworks including; the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, while stressing that Africa already has its own compass.

“For our continent, the Africa Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan serve as the blueprint for biodiversity resilience,” Nyambe said, highlighting Pillar A, which seeks to strengthen biodiversity governance through coherent, synergistic and coordinated approaches that halt and reverse biodiversity loss while building resilient ecosystems across Africa.

Botswana’s lived experience

That continental vision was grounded in practical experience by Botswana, the host country and one of Africa’s longest-standing practitioners of transboundary conservation.

“This gathering could not be timelier,” said Wynter Boipuso Mmolotsi, Botswana’s Minister of Environment and Tourism. “The world is facing unprecedented pressures; from rapidly evolving economies, both natural and technological, to the growing challenges posed by the triple planetary crisis: climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, and, more recently, severe desertification.”

Botswana, he reminded participants, had hosted the first Africa Biodiversity Summit just weeks earlier (Nov.2-5), culminating in the African Leaders’ Gaborone Declaration on Biodiversity — “a call to action for all Africans to adopt a sustainable pathway in managing our natural resources, one that will meaningfully contribute to economic growth, shared prosperity, and the well-being of our people.”

“For Botswana, transboundary conservation is not an abstraction. The country is party to three Transboundary Conservation Areas (TFCAs), through which it has seen “habitat regeneration, wildlife recovery, improved community livelihoods, enhanced law enforcement, and strengthened policy harmonization.”

“These initiatives have not been without challenges,” Mmolotsi acknowledged, “but they remain a proven model worthy of scaling up.”

He was equally clear that success requires more than declarations. “Adopting a Transfrontier Conservation Area model is not an end,” he said. “Its success requires continuous investment in policy support, financial resources, capacity building, stakeholder engagement, and holistic management. Let us ensure that these elements are adequately reflected and embedded within our project document.”

Botswana’s own reforms — from strengthening community-based natural resource management legislation to integrating wildlife, forestry, climate and agriculture policies — were offered as lessons rather than templates.

“We continue to learn and evolve,” Mmolotsi said, “drawing lessons from our own experiences and those of others.”

Conservation as cooperation and peace

For the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the importance of transboundary ecosystems extends far beyond biodiversity metrics. “Transboundary conservation areas represent more than ecological corridors,” said Lovita Ramguttee, the UNDP Resident Representative in Botswana. “They are platforms for regional cooperation, shared economic opportunity, and peacebuilding.”

Across Africa’s borderlands, she noted, ecosystems often overlap with areas facing fragility, competition over natural resources and limited state presence.

“When well designed, transboundary conservation and landscape initiatives can help reduce conflict, strengthen trust between neighbouring states, promote joint institutions, and create shared incentives for stability and sustainable development,” she said.

This framing, Ramguttee said, aligns closely with UNDP’s work in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. “We have seen that when communities benefit equitably from shared ecosystems, conservation becomes a driver of resilience and peace rather than a source of tension,” she said.

But she also issued a caution. “Vision without coordination and cohesion will fall short of its potential.” Addressing transboundary ecosystem challenges at a continental scale, she argued, is essential because “shared ecosystems demand shared solutions, collective action unlocks economies of scale, and a unified regional approach strengthens Africa’s voice in global biodiversity and climate processes.”

The money question

However, financing remained one of the most contentious and revealing challenges, a theme that surfaced repeatedly in Maun.

Abigail Khumoyame, Botswana’s Deputy Permanent Secretary for Natural Resources, offered a detailed account of the country’s experience implementing UNDP’s Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN) since 2014.

“As the government, it’s a huge liability for us and it’s not sustainable to effectively manage our protected areas relying entirely on public funds,” she said.  While Botswana focused on practical reforms, other voices pushed the financing debate into more explicitly political territory.

McLay Kanyangarara, s former Climate Change Advisor at COMESA, challenged the dominant narrative that frames biodiversity primarily as a cost.  “Biodiversity is a source of a lot of wealth,” he told The Independent on the sidelines of the workshop, pointing to medicinal plants, insects, fibres and forest products that sustain millions of informal livelihoods.

“Natural capital accounting is very critical,” he argued. “If we place a dollar value on biodiversity, then the Ministry of Finance becomes interested.”  Kanyangarara went further, questioning Africa’s reliance on external climate and biodiversity finance. African governments and communities, he said, already spend billions on conservation — but fail to tag it as such.

“We are bending over backwards to get 20 million dollars, when we ourselves are spending far more,” he said. “That is a beggar mentality.” His intervention, he said,  traces the roots of Africa’s conservation dilemmas to colonial disruption. “We lived in peace and harmony with nature,” he said. “The idea of exploiting and commercializing biodiversity for profit came with colonization.”

For him, transboundary conservation is as much about mental decolonization as institutional reform. “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery,” he said, invoking Bob Marley. “We are enslaved to think that solutions must come from others.”

Whose biodiversity, whose benefits?

Questions of equity also ran through the workshop, particularly around who benefits from conservation finance. Ntakadzeni Tshidada, the Director of Biodiversity Policy at South Africa’s National Biodiversity Institute, warned against approaches that prioritise protected areas while sidelining people.

“People are part and parcel of biodiversity,” she said. “Those who live adjacent to biodiversity also need to benefit.” She highlighted the difficulty of tracking private sector contributions and the tendency for biodiversity to be overshadowed by climate finance in national planning.

“We are prioritizing conservation,” she said, “but what about sustainable use, access and benefit sharing?”

Learning across Africa

The workshop brought together representatives from Africa’s regional economic communities — SADC, EAC, IGAD, ECCAS and ECOWAS — exposing stark differences in experience.

One clear lesson from Maun was the need for deliberate cross-regional learning. “In West and Central Africa, they are still familiarizing themselves with the concept of transboundary conservation,” Tshidada told The Independent, while Southern and Eastern Africa have decades of experience.

Even participants whose countries did not fall within the ten priority landscapes found value. Daniel Jidda, a forest officer from Nigeria, worked on the Gola transboundary landscape during the workshop.

“We discovered the barriers, developed a theory of change and an action plan,” he said. “I really added to my network,” he told The Independent when asked about his experience from the workshop.

Onesimus Muhwezi, the UNDP Regional Technical Advisor for Ecosystems and Biodiversity who also facilitated the workshop, reflected on both the intensity of the process and the road ahead.

“Over the last three and a half days, we’ve charted a pathway from business as usual, where everyone works alone, to working together for a common purpose,” he said.

The roadmap includes finalising the design phase by early 2025, securing political and institutional endorsement within six months, and preparing for engagement with the Global Environment Facility’s ninth replenishment cycle, beginning in July 2026.

For Khumoyame, Botswana’s Deputy Permanent Secretary for Natural Resources, the most important outcome was that the workshop produced something tangible. “For a change, we are not just talking to plans that are gathering dust,” she said. “We are committed to realising the 10–10–10 vision.”

“Together we can surely continue to protect our landscapes as member states and ensure realization of the goals and aspiration of biodiversity resilience programme,” she said.

“We are eagerly waiting for now, moving from the (conference) room, to planning, conceptualizing, realising the impact on the ground, those smiles on the community faces, those free movement for our wildlife, our endangered species being conserved, that’s what we are all looking for and towards and we will surely play our part.”

As the workshop participants packed their bags to return home, the rain continued to fall over Maun; steady, patient, and unbothered by borders– an apt metaphor for what the workshop set in motion; the slow, collective work of reconnecting Africa’s landscapes, and its politics, across lines drawn long after the ecosystems themselves were formed.