African Wildlife Foundation
[2] The African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (AWLF) was founded in 1961 by Russell E. Train, a wealthy judge, hunter, and member of the Washington Safari Club.
[3] Other founding members of the Safari Club were Nick Arundel, a former United States Marine Corps combat officer and journalist; Kermit Roosevelt Jr. of the Central Intelligence Agency; James S. Bugg, a businessman; and Maurice Stans, an accountant who would later serve as finance chairman of the Richard Nixon administration.
"The first major grant of the AWLF was $47,000 to help found the College of African Wildlife Management at Mweka, Tanzania, in 1963.
[9] The college was organized by Bruce Kinloch, Chief Game Warden of Tanganyika, as a pioneer institution for the training of African wildlife managers.
[10] Funding for Mweka was also provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Frankfurt Zoological Society, with facilities donated by the government of Tanganyika.
[11] In 1963, AWLF started a scholarship program to bring young Africans to American universities where they could study biology and wildlife management.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the AWLF continued to finance students, and also assisted conservation projects, often giving supplies such as tents, vehicle spare parts, water pumps, and photographic equipment, rather than cash.
[14] The AWF have said their recent programs are modelled around three central objectives: empowering people, conserving wildlife, and protecting land.
[23] The IUCN Red List classifies bonobos as an endangered species, with conservative population estimates ranging from 29,500 to 50,000 individuals.
[24] The Etosha-Skeleton Coast landscape, in the northern part of Namibia, is home to Etosha National Park and its vast salt pan, woodland, and savanna ecosystems.
The floodplains of the Zambezi River are surrounded by a mosaic of miombo and mopane woodlands and grasslands that include important wildlife migration corridors.
[25] The AWF has established the 160,000 acres (65,000 ha) Sekute Conservation Area in this region in partnership with the Sekute Chiefdom, holding two elephant corridors' helped wildlife authorities settle four new white rhinos in Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park in Zambia, joining the last surviving white rhino in the country, a bull.
The Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund gave AWF a portion of the proceeds from the first week's ticket sales for use in protecting the Amboseli Wildlife Corridor.
The GLTP is home to many of the species most popular with tourists, including lions, white and black rhinoceros, giraffes, elephants, hippopotamus and buffalos.
The AWF says the mega park will result in "creating new jobs and fortifying a tourism base [that is] not yet meeting its full potential".
The complex includes savanna woodlands, gallery forests and flooded plains where the Mekrou and Niver rivers meet.
[36] In Parc W, AWF and other International NGOs such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature, World Wide Fund for Nature and Africa 70 play a central role in communication, education and organization of local communities and their leaders, and help collect socio-economic and technical data.
[37] AWF is helping fund tree nurseries in Niger and Burkino Faso for replanting to provide fodder for the giraffes.
AWF partners in the region include the Association pour la Sauvegarde des Girafes du Niger, Centre National de Gestion des Réserves de Faune (CENAGREF), Benin and the Ministries of the Environment in Burkina Faso and Niger.
The Virunga landscape is an area of volcanic highlands around the point where Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo meet.
The Virunga ecosystem shelters chimpanzees, golden monkeys, forest elephants, and many species of birds, reptiles and amphibians.
AWF President Robinson McIlvaine later said that "There would be no mountain gorillas in the Virungas today ... were it not for Dian Fossey's tireless efforts over many years".
[40] More recently, the AWF coordinated fundraising and construction of a lodge overlooking the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park.
[41] According to Farley Mowat in his book Woman in the Mists, in the late 1970s, Fossey asked McIlvaine to temporarily serve as secretary-treasurer of the Digit Fund while he was AWF President.
[43] A census of mountain gorillas in the Virunga Massif in March and April 2010 showed that there had been a 26.3% increase in the population over the past seven years.
The Save Valley Conservancy, in Zimbabwe's southern lowveld area, forms part of the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park.
The AWF's headquarters are located in Nairobi, Kenya, with regional offices in South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Washington, DC.
