A new payments scheme rewards two rural communities on the edge of Botswana’s Okavango Delta for living alongside wildlife. Residents have installed cameras around their villages and earn money from photographs of elephants, lions and other wild animals that might raid vegetable gardens or kill livestock. The scheme is part of the Harmony with Wildlife program, run by conservation nonprofit Wild Impact and safari company &Beyond in partnership with Gogomoga and Tsutsubega, two remote villages with fewer than 500 residents each and no paved roads, schools, shops or electricity. Okavango Delta is home to elephants, hippos and large predators, as well as about 130,000 people, including the Indigenous San communities. 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, Venter said. In April 2024, rangers from the communities in the area, started helping residents document damage caused by wild animals so they could claim compensation for their losses 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 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,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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