Boreholes for Wildlife and Communities: Water Development in Chifunda GMA

Upper Luangwa Valley, Zambia — 2025 Season

In the Luangwa Valley, water defines everything.

Where it collects, wildlife follows. Where it disappears, pressure builds — on animals, on habitat, and on people.

Managing that pressure is one of the central challenges of conservation in Zambia’s Game Management Areas. In Chifunda GMA, in 2025, working alongside the licensed operator, a focused effort on strategic water development addressed both sides of that challenge — for wildlife and for surrounding communities.

Extending Life into the Dry Season

Chifunda holds a series of seasonal lagoons — productive wetland areas that attract dense concentrations of hippo, waterbuck, puku, and the predators that follow them through the wet season and into the early dry months. As the dry season intensifies, these lagoons shrink. The shallow ones disappear by August or September, pushing wildlife toward the Luangwa River earlier than is ideal for the landscape.

In 2025, a borehole was drilled at one of Chifunda’s key seasonal lagoons, designed to sustain it through the peak of the dry season. The purpose is clear: maintain a reliable water source beyond the rains, reduce the need for wildlife to travel long distances to permanent water, and prevent over-concentration along the Luangwa River.

When seasonal water disappears, animals are forced into fewer and fewer areas — often those with higher predator densities, greater human activity, and increased exposure to pressure from outside the system. By sustaining the lagoon, we create an alternative focal point: one that supports wildlife while reducing pressure on the river.

An alternative focal point — one that supports wildlife while reducing pressure elsewhere.

Shaping Movement, Reducing Pressure

Water placement directly influences how wildlife moves through a landscape. With the borehole sustaining the lagoon into October rather than August, wildlife can remain in less congested interior areas through the critical late dry-season months. Movement becomes more dispersed and less predictable. Pressure on the core river system is reduced.

Animals are also more likely to remain within areas that are actively managed — a direct conservation outcome from what looks, on its surface, like simple infrastructure.

This is not about controlling nature. It is about supporting a more balanced distribution across the landscape — one that reduces overuse of vulnerable areas and allows wildlife to persist across the full extent of the concession rather than compressing onto a narrow stretch of riverfront.

Chifunda's Place in the North Luangwa System

Chifunda holds more than 40 miles of Luangwa River frontage directly across from North Luangwa National Park — one of Africa’s most intact wilderness areas and home to one of the continent’s most significant black rhino recovery programs. Frankfurt Zoological Society has operated in this ecosystem for 38 years through the North Luangwa Conservation Programme, a formal partnership with DNPW.

Separately from the water infrastructure work, anti-poaching coordination and wildlife monitoring are carried out in Chifunda in collaboration with FZS and the NLCP. Both efforts — water management and protection work — share the same underlying objective: maintaining a functioning buffer that keeps pressure off North Luangwa and supports the long-term integrity of the corridor.

A lagoon that keeps buffalo and elephant in the interior during October is also keeping them away from the most exposed stretch of the boundary during the months when pressure from outside is highest. The water work and the protection work are distinct programs. In a landscape where wildlife distribution directly affects conservation outcomes, they are not unrelated.

Water for Communities

In parallel with the wildlife borehole, community boreholes were installed in Chifunda in 2025 — a contribution made in addition to the formal community obligation framework embedded in the concession agreement.

These serve two purposes that are both immediate and ecologically significant.

The immediate case is straightforward: communities in remote GMA areas frequently lack reliable access to clean water. Without it, long walks to distant sources expose community members to dangerous wildlife encounters and consume time that could go toward livelihoods and family. Clean water near home addresses those problems directly.

The ecological case is equally important. When communities lack access to water, they move toward it. And when they move toward it, wildlife loses space — particularly along rivers and seasonal lagoons that form the core of prime habitat in the upper Luangwa Valley.

By bringing water to communities, we help maintain the separation between human settlement and critical wildlife areas. The logic is simple. The commitment to sustain it is what makes it conservation.

How This Work Gets Done

In Chifunda, this work was carried out in collaboration with Kovango Safaris, the licensed concessionaire. Priority sites for both the wildlife and community boreholes were identified jointly, with drilling and installation supported through the partnership. It reflects the same principle as the Mumbwa water work: conservation investment is most effective when it is aligned between commercial partner, licensed operator, and the governance structures of the landscape.

Conservation in Working Landscapes

Chifunda is not a national park. It is a multi-use landscape, where conservation must coexist with human presence, agricultural activity, and the full complexity of life in a remote, resource-constrained environment.

That reality requires a different kind of approach: practical rather than theoretical, continuous rather than one-time, grounded in both ecology and community needs. Water development sits at the center of that approach because few interventions touch as many aspects of the system simultaneously — wildlife distribution, human settlement patterns, habitat condition, and the long-term resilience of the landscape.

Looking Forward

The boreholes drilled in Chifunda in 2025 are not endpoints. They are part of an ongoing effort to strengthen the resilience of this landscape. Over time, we will monitor wildlife usage patterns at the lagoon site, community uptake at the village installations, seasonal water retention, and pressure on surrounding habitats — adapting the approach as we learn what works.

Long-term conservation is not defined by a single project. It is defined by consistent, sustained engagement with the land and an honest record of that engagement over time.

A Broader Commitment

This is one of several initiatives underway across the areas Epic Safaris supports. Through partnerships with Kovango and Nedzo — and alongside conservation organizations including Frankfurt Zoological Society, Musekese Conservation, African Parks, and TNC — the goal is to contribute meaningfully to wildlife protection, habitat management, and community stability in two of Zambia's most important GMA landscapes.

And to document that work transparently. Over time, it is this record — clear, specific, and grounded in reality — that defines what an organization stands for.

This is one landscape. The record continues.