Meet the World’s First All-Female, Armed Anti-Poaching Unit
The groundbreaking group has already driven an 80 percent downturn in elephant poaching, and are powered by an innovative vegan camp kitchen in the African bush.
Members of the Akashinga in action. Credit: IAPF
In conservation, women are outnumbered by men by a ratio of 100:1 for front-line roles.
Now, a radical new conservation program is helping to change that, by training the most marginalized women from rural communities to become rangers and biodiversity managers.
Founded in 2017 by former special forces sniper Damien Mander, the Akashinga is an all-female group of rangers, whose job is to protect the land and animals from trophy hunters and poachers.
The Akashinga group started operations in Zimbabwe’s Lower Zambezi River, home to one of the largest elephant populations left in the world. Within two years, they had made nearly 200 arrests, and helped drive elephant poaching down by 80 percent.
This successful alternative model to trophy hunting is now being replicated across the country, with Akashinga patrols covering one million acres across five parks last year.
“These women have achieved what few armies in history have come close to – they won the hearts and minds of the local population. If given the opportunity, women will change the face of conservation forever”, says Mander.
The Akashinga are also leading the way with an innovative vegan camp kitchen operating from the African bush. The ‘Back to Black Roots Vegan Kitchen’ has served the rangers over 50,000 meals so far, and hopes to promote the healthy plant-based diets that were so popular in Africa before Westerners introduced commercial animal farming.
The vegan camp kitchen. Credit: IAPF
And there’s no signs of the Akashinga slowing down their crucial work: the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF), who lead the project, plans to employ 1,000 female rangers, and scale up from five parks to twenty by 2025.
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