Borckington, D.

Scholfield, K.

There is no overview of the collective activities of conservation NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa. We have made a first attempt by collecting details from as many organisations as we could find that work in Sub-Saharan Africa, and present findings on the work of over 280 organisations. We found that the number of NGOs in existence grew in the 1980s and blossomed in the 90s. Their distribution across the continent is patchy. NGOs work in about 14% of the continent’s protected areas. We estimate that average annual expenditure from 2004 to 2006 was just over $200 million. This is at most about 40% of the lowest predicted needs, and these predictions are themselves likely to be substantial underestimates of the sums required for effective conservation by conservation NGOs. Spending by country matches some declared conservation priorities well, without taking cost of doing conservation in different countries into account. In our concluding discussion we examine the diversity of the conservation NGO sector. We argue that the sector will probably need to scale up its activities by one order of magnitude to achieve its stated goals. We offer reasons why this might not be such an impossible task. But we also note that the possibility of more funding raises a number of awkward questions. These include: is money being spent effectively now? Does scaling-up mean more money to existing organisations or a whole set of new ones? More fundamentally, many studies of the performance of international NGOs in poorer countries, doing conservation, development and other activities have noted that there are many problems associated with existing levels and patterns of expenditure. Scaling up NGO activity will not deal with these problems, they could make many worse. We argue that the problems will be best addressed by recognising them explicitly

Scholfield KA

Non-governmental Organisations and African Wildlife Conservation: A Preliminary Analysis

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