Help Support Female Ranger Teams in Africa

The aim of this ongoing fundraising campaign on GlobalGiving is to raise funds for female and mixed ranger teams in Africa, in line with World Female Ranger Week on June 23-30 2023 - a ground-breaking global awareness week launched by our NGO, How Many Elephants, that celebrates and supports female rangers around the world. Female rangers are bold, changing the game and paving the way for women to stand alongside men at the forefront of conservation, but they need allies.

Thanks to your generous donations, we have recently purchased a vehicle for The Black Mambas, Africa’s first all-female ranger team, based in the Greater Kruger National Park in South Africa. Since their inception in 2013, elephant and rhino poaching has reduced by 76%. These women are working hard to protect wildlife and wild spaces, plus educate local communities on how to conserve and preserve their natural heritage. Their educational programme, ‘The Bush Babies’, now has over 1300 local children enrolled. This vehicle will enable the rangers to travel to more rural schools, allowing more pupils to get involved in community vegetable gardens, tree planting, social sciences and sustainable environmental management.

The Black Mambas also run a ‘Bush Grannies’ programme. As the grandmothers commonly raise the children while the parents go out to work, many have never seen wildlife in their natural habitat. We are helping to change that. The rangers take the ‘grannies’ out into the bush so they can see first-hand how the animals live and learn about the value of protecting them for future generations. They then relay these stories to their grandchildren and help educate them on the importance of protecting local biodiversity.

World Female Ranger Week brings together female wildlife rangers on a global platform to tell their stories, have access to peer support, offer and receive advice, and share knowledge. As champions of wildlife conservation, role models, educators and beacons of hope, these women are not only transforming attitudes towards the role of women but are also showing the capabilities and success of females in traditionally male roles. Less than 11% of the global wildlife ranger workforce is female. With women being natural communicators, protectors and investing their earned income in their families, bringing gender equality into the workforce enhances conservation efforts and relationships within communities.

"An entire gender has been marginalised in conversations on conservation. Women hold diverse roles in conservation, some motivated by poverty and hunger, others by a lack of choice in a patriarchal society, or for others, through empowerment and becoming a role model in the community. You can’t look at the bigger picture of the climate or biodiversity crisis without paying attention to both genders," says Holly Budge, Founder of How Many Elephants & World Female Ranger Week.

Find out more at www.worldfemalerangerweek.org

Links:

• World Female Ranger Week Website
• How Many Elephants Website