How to Avoid Africa's Crowds and Fund Conservation at the Same Time

When I first get on a consultation call with a new traveler looking to go to Africa, they say the same thing. "I'd like to see Cape Town, Victoria Falls, the Serengeti or the Maasai Mara and the great migration." Four highlights of a continent three times the size of the US, and their fame has run its course.

This can make for an awkward first ten minutes. I have to tell these folks the dream Africa trip  they're envisioning isn't the reality anymore. And in some cases, it should be avoided.

Photo Credit: Jeff Stivers

To be fair, those parks are famous for a reason. During the migration the Serengeti and the Mara get more than two million wildebeest, zebra and gazelle in one ecosystem, and I'm not going to pretend anywhere else matches that density. The problem is, they’re now too famous. In peak season the northern Serengeti, roughly 4,000 square kilometers, takes up to 600 safari vehicles and about 4,200 visitors a day. Last August a video from the Mara went viral, showing tourists out of their vehicles lining a riverbank, forcing migrating  wildebeest to turn back to the water. This September a driver on the Tanzania side, angling for a closer look at a crossing, put his vehicle and four guests into the Mara River.

So yes, there is a bountiful amount of wildlife in those locations. But I'm confident most traveler’s idea of a once in a lifetime safari is not chasing around thirty other safari vehicles to the same riverbank.

Meanwhile there are places where the wildlife viewing is strong and the tourism dollars are desperately needed.

Ruaha, in southern Tanzania, covers about 20,000 square kilometers and gets fewer than a tenth of the Serengeti's visitors. The wider Ruaha landscape holds roughly 10 percent of the lions left in Africa and the third biggest population of wild dogs anywhere. It also shows what happens to wildlife when the tourists aren't around. Between 2009 and 2014, by the government's own counts, the Serengeti's elephants roughly doubled, while the Ruaha-Rungwa ecosystem's fell from about 34,000 to about 8,000, and it has only stabilized since. Same country, same five years, and the difference lines up almost exactly with where the tourists were. The lions have the same problem. Researchers in Ruaha documented what they called the highest rate of lion killing in modern times, nearly 40 in 18 months, mostly by villagers next to the park who saw almost no benefit from having lions around. That's the gap tourism money is supposed to help close. 

In Laikipia, in central Kenya, lions have held at a steady density on working cattle ranches since the late 1990s, and the county carries the biggest share of the world's remaining Grevy's zebra, a species down to a few thousand animals. Ol Pejeta pays for most of a roughly six million dollar operating budget out of tourism and its cattle business. When travel stopped in 2020 it expected to lose about 70 percent of its business, around three million dollars, and started cutting wages and reducing staff. Unfortunately, that’s what happens to conservation when the bookings stop.

Murchison Falls is Uganda's biggest park, and in the 1960s it held about half of the country's 30,000 elephants. Then came Idi Amin and two decades of conflict, and poaching took more than 80 percent of them, along with every white rhino in the park. Wildlife in the park has since rebounded, to around 1,400 elephants and roughly 240 lions, with some of the highest leopard and hyena densities ever recorded in Africa. That recovery matters more than it sounds, because Murchison is now about the last lion stronghold Uganda has left. Queen Elizabeth National Park is down to 39, and the country as a whole lost about a fifth of its lions in three years. There are oil wells inside Murchison's boundary now, and this year's Ebola scare, just 20 cases, well contained and declared over by late July, decimated this year’s tourism revenue. Another example of excellent wildlife, and not nearly enough visitors helping to keep it that wa

Photo Credit: Jeff Stivers

One final example here out of many... The Lower Zambezi was the Zambian president's private reserve until 1983, which kept mass tourism out long enough for the lodges to start their own conservation trust in 1994. You can spend a morning on the water there without encountering a single other traveler, which is why it’s one of my favorite stretches of wilderness in Africa. It also had an open-pit copper mine inside the park approved and blocked more than once, and the lodges, and the hundreds of local jobs they carry, are a big part of the argument against it.

Photo Credit: Jeff Stivers

So, that's my actual pitch on those calls. You still get an incredible wildlife safari, but you get it without a line of vehicles on the same riverbank, and what you spend on park fees and camp nights ends up paying the rangers and funding conservation in places that really need it.

Twenty years in, some clients still want the Serengeti, and if we're honest about what it looks like up front, they have a great time. I'd just rather they go knowing there's a version of Africa that needs them more.