Karingani Game Reserve Tour

Karingani Game Reserve

Karingani is a 150,000 Ha Game Reserve that forms part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area. It boasts a diverse geological composition, which gives rise to a large variety of fauna and flora. Karingani is home to various protected species, including elephant, rhino, Pangolin, and wild dogs, among many others.

Operators of Karingani say the reserve will finance itself by attracting high-end tourism and measures its progress through a novel set of conservation indicators.

Attracting private capital into conservation projects has long been proposed as a way to cover shortfalls from public and philanthropic funding sources, with Karingani being a recent example of this approach.

But local communities have complained in recent years that the land Karingani is being developed on was signed over to government officials under pretences, raising questions about power imbalances in the model.

When COVID-19 started to sweep across the world last year, conservationists feared that it would be a disaster for Africa’s wildlife. Tourism revenues evaporated, causing salary cuts and layoffs for rangers in protected game parks. But after a spike in poaching incidents, which looked to be confirming those fears at first, in some countries, the opposite has proved to be the case: harsh lockdown measures instead led to a temporary decline in the poaching of rhinos and other large game.

Still, the crisis has laid bare one of the central dilemmas for conservation in Africa: who pays for it, and are those funding streams resilient enough to hold up under pressure?

In the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area, a patchwork of protected nature reserves along the borderlands of Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, some investors are saying the answer is the private sector. One example is the Karingani Game Reserve in southwestern Mozambique, which is developing what it says will be a flagship example of private capital-driven conservation in Africa.

But with a history of land conflict between the reserve and rural communities living nearby, how will it balance its ambitious plans for high-end ecotourism with the livelihoods and cultural needs of those communities? And will those plans lead to a profitable, sustainable business model that can deliver benefits for wildlife and local people?

As the Mozambican government continues to encourage foreign investment into conservation in the wake of COVID-19, Karingani may prove to be a test case for whether private reserves can deliver on their promises.