Payment scheme in Botswana rewards villages for wildlife photos
A new program pays two remote Botswana villages for camera‑trap pictures of elephants, lions and other animals that wander into their communities.
Exciting news from the edge of the Okavango Delta!
A new payments scheme is rewarding two rural communities for living alongside wildlife.
Residents of Gogomoga and Tsutsubega, each with fewer than 500 people and no paved roads, schools, shops or electricity, have installed camera traps around their villages.
They earn money from photographs of elephants, lions and other wild animals that sometimes raid vegetable gardens or threaten livestock.
The scheme is part of the Harmony with Wildlife program, run by conservation nonprofit Wild Impact and safari company &Beyond.
Wild Impact’s CEO Andrew Venter told Mongabay in a video call that wildlife commonly enters villages. Elephants, for example, eat crops and damage water boreholes, which need to be heavily fenced, but the communities are “remarkably tolerant” of wildlife.
In April 2024, rangers from the area began helping residents document damage caused by wild animals so they could claim compensation from Botswana’s wildlife department.
This sparked the idea of setting up camera traps to reveal when and where elephants and other large mammals go.
The communities then jointly worked with Wild Impact to deploy the cameras in a way that didn’t interfere with peoples’ privacy.
After two years of watching footage of wild animals roaming through the villages, Wild Impact recognized the need to acknowledge the community’s role in conservation and promote coexistence.
Another step forward for people‑wildlife harmony in Botswana.
