Namibia for Life initiative has received over U$60million worth of funding to protect wildlife and sustaining rural livelihoods.
This dedicated funding comes at a time traditional donor funding is increasingly declining.
The program, Namibia-for-Life is part of the Project Finance for Permanence initiative, which links funding to meeting conservation, governance or community milestones.
The package brings together international public and private conservation partners to support Namibia’s community based natural resource management system, which covers 91 conservancies and forests covering more than 230,000 square kilometers (88,800 square miles) of land.
In Namibia’s rural communities, communal conservancies are engines that drive conservation and sustainable development.
To ensure sustainable support for their efforts, N4L has three main components: an Endowment for Extension Services, a Socio-economic Fund, and an Endowment for Conservation Performance Payments.
As the developing world’s first PFP for community-managed conservation areas, N4L can secure land under conservancy status including exclusive wildlife zones; maintain viable wildlife populations, expand the value chain to spur economic growth in conservancies; improve general living conditions of conservancy members; manage human-wildlife conflict; reduce poaching; and incorporate climate adaptation and resilience into plans and as a way of life.
