January 24th is the International Day of Education, a day to celebrate and advocate for education and its role in making our world a healthier, safer, and more sustainable place.
We know that to engage with wildlife conservation, people’s own basic needs must be met. Few can afford to put the future of wildlife before the survival of their own families. Equally, we believe that if conservation is to succeed, then children must learn to appreciate wildlife and the natural world and understand its importance from an early age.
As a result, environmental education and outreach are ingrained throughout the projects Tusk supports, but we are particularly proud of our own Pan African Conservation Education programme (PACE).
PACE was set up in 2004 with Siren Conservation Education to focus on issues affecting poorer people in Africa as they go about their everyday lives. The programme provides educational materials based on solutions that we have seen have made a real difference in people’s lives in communities where we worked, especially those living alongside wildlife.
The place-based and practical focus of PACE has made it a welcome tool for teachers grappling with the competency and project-based curricula that most African governments have introduced. Action sheets are widely used for practical school projects, for individual learners as part of their curriculum learning, or in school clubs. What could be better than having kids learn basic curriculum skills through a project designing and creating a school garden that will be climate resilient and protected from the local elephant population?
We are frequently told that there is a lack of African-sourced content. Where it exists online, much is behind paywalls, beyond the means of most schools or learners. PACE helps people design outreach and educational programmes and provides materials online and in print, free of charge.
This is a huge contribution to environmental and wildlife education in Africa, and we thank Tusk's sponsors and supporters for making it possible. Education officers in National Parks, Conservancies and Protected areas often lack budgets and materials — by providing relevant, high-quality, up-to-date educational materials, we enable them to do their work.
Education is not only about providing knowledge, but also about providing skills and the ability to apply them, empowering people to do better. We are confident and proud that at PACE we are doing that, making a difference.
A 2019 impact assessment worked with 40 of our partners, in 17 African countries. It estimated that over two years 6,050 new people were applying PACE solutions to their local environmental problems and 14,000 benefitted from that uptake of solutions. 58% of those partners reported that themselves or their communities were using solutions they learned about in PACE to help solve their human-wildlife conflict problems, and more people were actively protecting wildlife after using PACE than before.
Particularly heartening is that more people were finding ways to earn a living from leaving wildlife alive after learning from PACE. More people were monitoring human-wildlife conflict after using PACE than did so beforehand, and more people were actively protecting wildlife than before. 70% were using PACE-inspired solutions to solve water-related problems, and 70% to improve soil fertility problems.
In 2021 alone, 11,000 more people were known to be using PACE to inform practical actions — setting up bee fences or growing chillis to protect livestock, producing vegetables in school gardens, and more.
Another huge role that PACE fulfils is spreading the conservation message of Tusk’s many partner projects. We co-create education materials, working with some of these dynamic and forward-thinking wildlife conservationists. Tusk projects include an extraordinary breadth of expertise that we can make available, in accessible, fun, and meaningful formats to audiences in schools and communities across a much wider area than they may have the capacity, or remit, to serve. Their experience and insight result in rich, informed and up-to-date resources.
Producing materials and education projects with VulPro in South Africa has resulted in this being our Year of the Vulture. Popular culture worldwide tends to attribute rather negative traits to vultures, which in reality are incredibly inspiring creatures.
Many people kill them because they fear the species brings ill luck, others kill them to use as good luck charms, to help predict the future, and bring good health or wealth. They are a much-misunderstood species, and education is a sure way to bust some of the myths.
Our partnership with VulPro in South Africa means there will be children in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria, as well as around more vulture poaching hotspots in South Africa, all learning vultures this school term. We already have a new Vulture workbook illustrated with children’s drawings and poems — education changing perceptions, changing behaviours, for a more sustainable future.
