Description
The It’s Wild! Bushcamps are an ecotourism partnership between the local communities and Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO)
 
Some of COMACO’s achievements to date include:
Over 3000 animals saved from poaching annually.
Annual incomes have increased by over 250% for both men and women
Food crop diversification
View the Presentations
Enjoy a memorable stay at one of the following locations:
Chifunda Bushcamp
North Luangwa Valley
Mwanya Bushcamp
South Luangwa Valley
Safari
It’s Wild! bush-camp guests are accompanied on walking safaris by well trained, armed escorts & safari guides who interpret & enhance the safari experience.
Live the sights, sounds, and smells of the Luangwa valley, and don’t miss the beautiful Zambian sunset!
All It’s Wild! Bushcamps, are majority owned by the local community in partnership with the rural enterprise company, Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO) Your stay at an It’s Wild! Bushcamp helps support COMACO’s sustainable incomeproducing activities such as rice, soya-bean, and vegetable farming, poultry farming and, organic beekeeping.
These activities reduce poaching and provide food-secure alternative livelihoods to local villagers
Accommodation
It’s Wild! Bushcamps offer guests spacious elegance blended with rustic charm. Each camp consists of 3 chalets made of woven local bamboo and thatch, designed to make you feel one with nature. The chalets, run on solar power, are airy and cool, and offer openair en-suite bathrooms, hot showers and modern facilities.
The chalets are a thoughtful balance between back-to-nature simplicity and essential comfort in authentically African style.
Each chalet overlooks the Luangwa River with hippos being your closest neighbors.
Dining
The central dining and campfire areas provide fantastic views of the Luangwa River to watch thirsty wildlife come from the National Park to drink. Solar and paraffin lanterns provide soft, natural lighting for the dining area.
Guests may choose full board or selfcatering with the help of our trained chefs.
Traditional Zambian dishes are always available, made from a whole selection of locally grown organic produce. Clients make special requests when booking.
Wildlife
The It’s Wild! Bush-camps are home to a wide diversity of fauna and flora. Eavesdrop on the nightly conversation of hippos and observe a wide variety of species up close and personal.
The Luangwa valley has more than 400 of Zambia’s 732 species of birds, including 39 birds of prey and 47 migrant species.
Animals such as zebras, elephants, puku, warthogs, black-spotted hyenas, elands, Cookson wildebeests, kudu, Thorneycroft’s giraffe, leopards, and of course, lions.
Traveling Distances & Special Requests
Mfuwe Intl. Airport to Mwanya Bushcamp: 67km
Mfuwe Intl. Airport to Chifunda Bushcamp: 252km
About COMACO
COMACO is a model for rural development that supports natural resource management. It operates through a community-owned trading centre, registered as a non-profit company, called the Conservation Farmer Wildlife Producer Trading Centre.
Community residents benefit from this trading centre by receiving high market value for goods they produce and having access to affordable farmer inputs and improved farming skills on the condition that they adopt land use practices that help conserve their area's natural resources. Specific land use practices required include conservation farming, which helps maintain soil fertility, crops that help reduce conflicts with wildlife or rates of land clearing, and commitment to stop wildlife snaring or illegal hunting. Under these conditions and by increasing the market value of more desired crops, the model is able to influence the land use practices of thousands of households across large landscapes that are associated with important wildlife and watershed resources. All proceeds from the company are reinvested in efforts to achieve food security, increased rural income, and improved natural resource management. With assistance from a range of collaborating partners, COMACO has become increasingly self-financing to help sustain efforts to mitigate problems of environmental degradation in areas where poverty and food insecurity were primary factors driving this degradation. Six basic steps describe how COMACO has set about to achieve increased synergies between agriculture, markets and conservation:
1. Target poor, food-insecure farming families with improved farming practices (conservation farming, composting, improved seed varieties, etc.) to increase food production and attain sufficient food to meet their annual needs.
2. Concurrent with step one, organize farmers into producer groups, especially those learning improved farming practices, and promote group commitment to abandon land use practices destructive to natural resources.
3. Diversify livelihood skills (livestock husbandry, dry season gardening, carpentry, bee-keeping, improved fisheries management, etc.) among these producer groups to increase opportunities for earning legal income without degrading natural resources in their area.
4. Mobilize producer groups in a prescribed area as a depot unit and establish a trading depot for bulking goods for markets.
5. Establish a regional trading center that offers producer groups through their depots fair, high-paying producer prices, on-site transactions, and reliable transport of goods to high-paying markets.
6. Formalize an agreement with producer groups through their depot that such services and benefits are available only if producer groups are fully compliant to land use practices not in conflict with their natural resources as guided by a community-approved land use plan.
Challenges
In Zambia's Luangwa Valley, one of Africa's great wildlife ecosystems, the black rhinoceros went extinct in less than a decade during the 1970's and early 1980's. Its elephant population was reduced by almost half in the same period by people who lived around the park and sought income from the illegal hunting of its wild animals. Their motivation came from illegal markets.
More recently, hungry people living in Luangwa Valley discovered that using snares to kill wild animals was a good substitute for farming. By exchanging game meat for grain they failed to grow themselves, rural people managed to get by without having to be good farmers.
Thousands of animals were killed annually, often slow and agonizing deaths, strangled and cut by steel wire. Such exotic and charismatic species as the lion, wild dog, kudu and roan were vulnerable to this horrific fate. Snaring became widespread in the Luangwa Valley and conventional efforts to police against it failed. It became a silent killer of wildlife, and its detection by wildlife police officers became almost impossible. With so many people relying on snaring to meet their food security needs, conventional law enforcement was doomed from the beginning.
With a struggling tourism industry unable to provide residents of the Luangwa Valley a reliable source of income to make their lives better, large-scale agricultural out-grower schemes owned by multi-national companies found a ready workforce to grow cotton and tobacco. It was a new form of land use with minimal controls. As a result the use of pesticides accelerated as did the rate of land clearing. Over the past decade, cotton has become king and has reached many parts of the Luangwa Valley's watershed and prime wildlife areas. Illegal settlements have penetrated deeply into the valley's protected national forest network in search of more fertile soils to grow cotton. Prime farm land is exhausted after 4 to 5 years of growing cotton, and today farmers are opening new farm plots on hilly slopes where gully erosion and downriver effects of flooding are increasing. This causes a rapid discharging of rainwater that otherwise would have replenished ground water resevoirs. Not only is Zambia losing a valued resource, water, but also untold volume of topsoil that washes away each year and empties into the Luangwa River and beyond. The thousands of tons of pesticides used to support these crops have had untold effects on insects and soil micro-organismsall so vital for pollination of wild plants and the capacity of soils to restore nutrients. The economic losses to Zambia are not calculated, yet they are very real and potentially threatening to future livelihoods.
Throughout the Luangwa River, which runs through the middle of the Luangwa Valley, poor farmers with low levels of education found a relatively easy way of making money by netting fish. In areas where 2-4 pound tilapia bream could once be found, populations have all but collapsed and fishing pressure has intensified with cheap, smaller mesh nets to harvest the remaining undersized, pre-adult fish. An entire food chain in less than twenty years is now under severe threat of collapsing, having unknown consequences on such species as the fishing eagle, fishing owl, otter and crocodile - as well as humans.
Development and conservation can do a better job for Africa and for Luangwa Valley. A broken ecosystem can take generations to repair and extinctions may never be replaced. Biodiversity and ecosystem services are foundations for development and help reduce risks of poverty and famine. Lose them and a country pays dearly to compensate, often in the form of disease, crime, illiteracy and lost opportunities.
Zambia is a country at peace, comfortable with democracy and tolerant of different cultures and ideas. It has the kind of enabling environment where solutions to these problems could be found, tested, modeled and perfected, and quite possibly offered to countries beyond its own national boundaries. Luangwa Valley has become Zambia's living laboratory for meeting this challenge and finding a balance between development and conservation, to reconcile the needs of poor, hungry people with the needs of a fragile and an increasingly damaged ecosystem, renown for its great wildlife assets. COMACO is the model that was developed in response to this challenge and is now being tested, replicated, and refined to integrate improved technologies and business practices into a more holistic land management approach.
This section describes the environmental and livelihood challenges COMACO has taken on, broken down by different categories listed in the "Challenges" box at the top left of this page. Each category section provides a link to information that covers environmental threats, their growing impact on the Luangwa Valley ecosystem, and the various livelihood needs that result from these threats but which can intensify environmental threats further.
Solutions
Poverty, illiteracy, and hunger cripple lives and undermine opportunities to manage natural resources sustainably. COMACO takes the view that conservation can be a source of solutions to these problems if harnessed by the right kind of markets that promote environmentally safe products and production practices. It requires an organization of responsible and motivated people who can manage an effective program of extending skills and knowledge to marginalized, economically depressed areas. It is also an organization of qualified people who can move commodities produced by rural communities through a supply chain into finished, quality products that sustain producer prices while adding value to conservation. It is an equation for rural development in Africa.
External markets often drive rural economies, and in many instances they are not always sensitive to the needs of the land. If left unchecked, these market influences can leave rural people with fewer choices to plan and sustain their livelihoods if natural resources become degraded, thus increasing future risks of hardships and suffering. Rather than be driven by such influences, COMACO helps rural communities plan their own future around markets they can choose and which are also good for their land, hence its name, "Community Markets for Conservation" or COMACO.
The "Solutions" box to the left accesses more detailed information about the various solutions COMACO and its partners support. Each of these solutions contribute to the various steps that the COMACO model operate by. These steps are listed below. By no means are the various technologies, production practices and strategies adopted by COMACO complete. COMACO continues to evolve and learn new ways to enhance the relationship between rural development and conservation, but the list provided gives a good understanding of the progress and commitment COMACO has reached thus far.
The key steps of implementation the COMACO model follows are as follows:
Survey and assess household income and food security. This establishes a baseline to plan markets and training interventions and a basis for targeting households for participation in COMACO.
Achieve food security among households selected as food-impoverished. This step involves a number of interventions designed to increase production of food crops and secondarily, cash crops. Included in this step is the formation of farmer producer groups, the primary producers and beneficiaries of COMACO.
Formulate community-based land use plans that promote better farming methods and land use practices conducive to wildlife production and other conservation objectives. Community leaders help lead this process with assistance from COMACO. These plans are simple and target village groupings, called Village Area Groups or VAGs, based on their own decisions to eliminate key threats affecting natural resources in their area.
Facilitate improved producer prices through a network of rural trading depots linked to a regional community trading centre (CTC). The CTC works to improve market linkages with the trading depots by enhancing trading partners and marketing opportunities through value-added processing and packaging that attract consumer interest in the social and environmental benefits associated with these products.
Make household compliance to the adopted land use plan a condition for receiving trade benefits from the trading centre. This step requires effective verification procedures linked to trade benefits tied to compliance.
Formalize the regional trading centre into a branch (franchise) of the non-profit parent company, Conservation Farmer Wildlife Producer Trading Centre (CTC), with producer membership on its Board for increasing community-wide support for trade in products that enhance conservation success. COMACO facilitates community shareholder ownership of the CTC as non-profit registered company, whose articles of association require all net revenues be reinvested to increase food security, rural income and conservation.
Manage each trading centre branch (franchise) as a self-financing business for sustaining farmer commitment to improved land use practices and increased food security linked to parallel efforts to improve business plans and strategic planning decisions for the sustainability of each CTC branch.
Develop improved market opportunities at both the national and international level. In seeking improved producer prices for registered CTC producer groups, COMACO works to develop new products and market opportunities for giving COMACO producer group members the best prices possible for goods and services in exchange for long-term commitment to conservation guidelines.
Results
WCS views COMACO as a truly innovative and pioneering approach to managing wildlands and conserving wildlife resources around Zambia's national parks and national forests. As an approach to conservation, it builds increased protection for larger landscapes that extend well beyond the boundaries of these protected areas by relying on producers to adopt land use practices designed to safeguard the surrounding ecosystem. Because of its scale and inherent complexity, it is important to monitor COMACO's results to validate the model itself and to improve its overall performance with increased understanding of how its key relationships work and relate to COMACO-based interventions. In many ways, COMACO has truly become one of the largest-scale experiments addressing the potential links and synergies between rural development and natural resource conservation in Africa today.
As a science-based institution committed to studying and developing improved ways to manage wildlands and conserve wildlife resources, WCS invests significant resources to monitor and analyse COMACO's results. It also seeks third-party partnerships to increase the level of objectivity for this analysis. Cornell University represents one example of an academic institution working closely with WCS to provide academic oversight on the analysis of COMACO's results and to contribute additional scientific collaboration in such fields as agronomy, earth sciences, economics, social sciences and animal health sciences. Additional academic partners include Virginia Tech University (watershed modeling) and Berkeley University (economic analysis).
This site provides a snapshot of some of the analyses being carried out to assess COMACO's progress and level of achievements in bridging rural income and food security with conservation. Results are updated periodically as surveys and research teams complete their studies. Summaries of these results can be viewed by selecting the particular topic listed in the Results Categories box to the left.
How You Can Help
As we increase our efforts to expand COMACO's influence in Luangwa Valley and other regions of Zambia, the challenges of raising the necessary financing grow as well. Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is encouraged that COMACO is showing credible and convincing capacity to become self-financing. Based on our first trading center in Lundazi, it takes between 3 to 5 years for a newly established trading centre to sustain its own costs and range of services to promote improved rural livelihoods and increased conservation results. As WCS works to create new trading centers as hubs for COMACO-based markets and interventions, the long-term impact on conservation and rural livelihoods will most certainly improve.
To meet these costs, our WCS Zambia program appeals for your help. Every dollar we raise is carefully managed to ensure COMACO's trading centres have well trained staff capable of running their business and extension training operations. Qualified staff at our Lusaka office operate a back-up office for making procurements and facilitating overall COMACO logistics. In addition, WCS conducts periodic internal audits to ensure our financing of the COMACO program is achieving benchmarks based on carefully thought-out workplans and budgets.
WCS invites you to consider making a donation as an investment in our COMACO business model for conservation. Regardless of the size or specification of a donation, such as transform a poacher, support a bee-hive or help procure needed equipment , our staff will do its utmost to keep you updated on COMACO's progress through its internet-based news stories updated regularly on this website. Should you need more direct dialogue with our staff to learn more about where donations are most needed or how to plan a more significant gift for addressing broader needs of COMACO, we encourage direct communication by phone or email. We suggest you direct your inquiries through either
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