AWF’s mission is to ensure wildlife and wild lands thrive in modern Africa.

The continent of Africa is unique in its amazing patrimony of wildlife and wild lands. From elephant to rhino to giraffe, from the great cats to the great apes, Africa’s wildlife is of singular global value. At the same time, with the youngest and fastest-growing human population in the world, Africa faces many unique challenges in balancing conservation with infrastructure development and human well-being. With this as a backdrop, African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) looks to the future of Africa while protecting its culture and natural heritage.

One of the largest and oldest conservation organizations that focus solely on Africa, AWF was founded in 1961, a time of fundamental political and developmental change on the continent of Africa as well as the time when the global conservation movement was nascent. AWF’s first project – to help establish the College of African Wildlife Management at Mweka, on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro – was founded to train young African conservationists across the continent to conserve wildlife in the postcolonial era.

The same values and priorities demonstrated in that first project still hold true today: A focus on African wildlife as a continental resource; a realization that the best way to conserve Africa’s wildlife is by investing in Africa’s people; and finally, a focus on African ownership and African institutions.

Today, Africa is a continent of rising economic growth, entrepreneurial innovation, and rapid development. AWF is looking to the future and working to negotiate a significant place for wildlife and wildlands while understanding the need for economic benefit.

The key elements of AWF’s current strategy include:

Wildlife Conservation: Africa is home to some of the most iconic species on the planet – many of which are facing extinction, including mountain gorillas, the elephant, and the rhino. By putting safeguards in place like training rangers, using sniffer dogs, and empowering communities, AWF is helping to ensure all of Africa’s wildlife survives. Recent initiatives are focused on crisis management and response to the dire epidemics of poaching and illegal trade. For the past four years, fighting the current poaching and trafficking crisis has taken a large share of AWF’s bandwidth through Species Protection Grants and the placement of detection dogs and handlers in key airports.

Land and Habitat Protection: AWF recognizes that without land, wildlife simply cannot survive. This is why land is at the core of their conservation efforts. By working in large areas that cover entire countries and even span borders, AWF supports critically important landscapes that harbor biodiversity and offer people economic opportunities. To ensure that conservation efforts move forward, they partner with governments, organizations, and communities, offering them incentives such as education, training in sustainable agriculture, and ecotourism in exchange for setting aside land.

Community Empowerment and Education: AWF is improving the lives of local people, helping their communities, and saving wildlife simultaneously. They work directly with communities to understand the obstacles they face and provide solutions specific to their needs. These solutions provide jobs, conservation training, educational opportunities through key programs like Classroom Africa, and, ultimately, the ability for people to better their own lives.

Economic Development: Economic development is absolutely critical to Africa’s conservation future. By setting up economic enterprises, incentivizing conservation, and investing in landscapes across the continent, AWF creates new opportunities for Africans to both improve their lives and embrace conservation. These ventures allow people to earn additional income, learn new job skills, get sustainability training, generate steady revenue for their communities, and be an important part of conservation efforts. This focus on the economic incentives for conservation behaviors is currently represented by Umiliki Investments – AWF’s impact investing vehicle.

AWF is recognized by the African Union (AU) as its principal partner for conserving wildlife and wild lands. AWF’s unique goal is to be “the primary advocate for wildlife and wild lands in a modern and prosperous Africa.”

AWF has conservation investments in 16 of Africa’s most important wildlife countries, with field projects ranging from relatively small partnership grants helping to protect an endangered species like the rhino, to large multimillion-dollar, multiyear programs funded by donor governments and international finance institutions. AWF has used the best available information and consensus-based science to identify and prioritize 37 key priority conservation landscapes around the continent. AWF seeks to maintain a portfolio of meaningful activities in each of the key Regional Economic Blocs of Africa (East, Southern, Central, West, Horn of).

Governed by an international Board of Trustees of 23, AWF is large enough to have presence and policy influence but small enough to be agile and responsive. AWF was the first international conservation organization to establish offices in Nairobi, Kenya. Today, AWF headquarters occupies a beautiful seven-acre campus in a prominent and visible location in Nairobi. AWF also maintains a significant presence in Washington, DC, with staff based in 25 other locations across 11 countries. AWF has an annual budget of $27 million, with net assets of $50 million and approximately 165 staff.