How Conservation Actually Works in Zambia’s Game Management Areas

Most safari operations describe conservation as something they support. A program. An initiative. A percentage of revenue directed toward a cause. Something that runs alongside the core business.

In working landscapes, that framing does not hold.

In working landscapes like Mumbwa West and Chifunda, conservation is not something that happens alongside operations. It is the operations — or it should be. The decisions that determine whether a GMA holds wildlife over time are not made in board meetings or grant applications. They are made on the ground, continuously, by the people and organizations present in the landscape every season.

Whether anti-poaching patrols have the resources to be effective. Whether wildlife is distributed across the landscape or compressed into predictable concentrations. Whether communities have enough economic stake in wildlife to defend it against alternative land uses. Whether fires are managed in ways that maintain habitat. Whether the governance structures that oversee all of this are actually functional.

These are not conservation program questions. They are operational questions — the daily and seasonal reality of managing a working landscape.

How the System Works

In both Mumbwa West and Chifunda, conservation outcomes depend on how multiple entities coordinate — not on what any single one of them does alone.

In Mumbwa West, the licensed operator is Nedzo Safaris, which holds the Hunting Concession Agreement with DNPW. Musekese Conservation, operating in partnership

with African Parks, coordinates anti-poaching and wildlife monitoring programs across the Kafue buffer zone. At the landscape level, the Mumbwa GMA Conservation Partnership Steering Committee brings together DNPW, TNC, African Parks, Musekese Conservation, the Zambian Carnivore Programme, elected Community Resource Boards, and traditional Chiefs — a formal governance body with defined responsibilities and regular meetings. Epic participates in this structure alongside the operator as a stakeholder in the landscape.

In Chifunda, the licensed operator is Kovango Safaris. Frankfurt Zoological Society has been active in the North Luangwa ecosystem for 38 years through the North Luangwa Conservation Programme, a formal partnership with DNPW that covers a vast area of the upper valley. Chifunda’s GMA sits as a direct buffer zone on the park’s eastern boundary. Epic works alongside the operator and coordinates with FZS and the NLCP on conservation initiatives in the area.

Each entity plays a defined role. DNPW holds regulatory authority. The licensed operators conduct all concession activity and carry legal responsibility. Conservation NGOs contribute scientific capacity, community relationships, and field programs that commercial operators cannot replicate. Community structures bring local legitimacy and the ground-level engagement that determines whether conservation translates into daily life. Epic’s role is commercial partnership and conservation support — working within those structures, not directing them.

Why the Commercial Structure Matters

The revenue generated by well-run hunting concessions in Zambia’s GMAs funds the system. It pays scout salaries, maintains roads passable for patrol vehicles, meets community obligations that give local people an economic stake in wildlife, and generates the concession fees and trophy revenues that flow to DNPW and Community Resource Boards.

Without sustained commercial revenue, the systems that support these landscapes become difficult to maintain. Remove the conservation outcomes — wildlife that is present, distributed, and protected — and you remove the experience that generates the revenue in the first place. The systems are integrated, not parallel.

This is the structure that Zambia’s GMA framework was designed to create. It works when all parts of it function together.

Water as One Example

Consider water. In Zambia’s GMAs, water determines where wildlife moves and where it concentrates. During the dry season, as seasonal pans and lagoons disappear, wildlife is drawn toward permanent water sources. That concentration creates predictability — and predictability creates vulnerability.

Managing water in a GMA — creating water points in interior zones, sustaining seasonal lagoons through the dry season, providing community access to clean water near settlements — is land management with direct consequences for wildlife distribution and habitat condition. The community borehole that reduces settlement pressure on rivers is doing conservation work, even though it looks like infrastructure. The earthen dam that keeps a water point functional into the dry season is influencing where wildlife is during the most vulnerable months of the year.

One intervention. Multiple outcomes. This is how well-functioning systems work.

Why Document This

There is a persistent gap between how hunting operations in GMAs are perceived and what they actually do on the ground. That gap exists partly because the work is not visible, and partly because the people doing it have historically not documented it publicly.

The public record about GMA hunting operations should reflect the reality of what those operations do — the full system of obligations, partnerships, and on-the-ground interventions that determine whether these landscapes hold wildlife over time.

What follows in this series is specific — named partners, described interventions, honest framing of what is still being learned. This is not an argument. It is a record of work. Read it against the reality of these landscapes. That is the only fair test.