#akashinga

From Bring on the Bad Guys: Abomination #001

“Well of Ages”, by Phillip Kennedy Johnson (W), Sergio Dávila, Aure Jimenez and Arif Prianto (A)

“Akashinga – the Brave Ones” © Brent Stirton, Getty Images,

Akashinga (‘The Brave Ones’) is a ranger force established as an alternative conservation model. It aims to work with, rather than against local populations, for the long-term benefits of their communities and the environment. 

Akashinga comprises women from disadvantaged backgrounds, empowering them, offering jobs, and helping local people to benefit directly from the preservation of wildlife. 

Petronella Chigumbura (30), a member of the all-female anti-poaching unit, participates in stealth and concealment training in the Phundundu Wildlife Park, Zimbabwe.

Excerpt:

Damien Mander has thought a lot about best practices for protecting wildlife.

As the Australian-born founder of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation, Mander has spent the past 10 years working on the front lines protecting rhino and other wildlife in four African nations. For most of that time his work in this dangerous arena took what he calls “a fairly military approach.” That’s not surprising considering his prior decade-long career with governmental and private military organizations.

More recently, however, he began to wonder if maybe “we’ve done it wrong all these years.”

That shift, he said recently at the 2018 Animal Rights National Conference in Los Angeles, led to the rollout of a new program from the anti-poaching organization. Launched in 2017, the Akashinga program (“The Brave Ones” in Shona) is focused on developing a new force of all-female wildlife rangers tasked with protecting rhinos, elephants and other wildlife from poachers. Akashinga has so far recruited and trained nearly three dozen women.

Mander said Akashinga is a departure from the male-centric military and special-ops world in which he has long operated — what he calls “one of the ultimate boys’ clubs” — and his newer realm of conservation rangers, where the male-to-female ratio is 100 to 1.

To build his Akashinga team Mander, who had not previously trained women, sought applicants from among the most vulnerable females in rural areas. He recruited abuse survivors, abandoned wives, orphans, sex workers and single mothers — women who, he said, “weren’t victims of circumstance; they were victims of men.” Also joining the team this past December was Vimbai Kumire, the youngest daughter of Zimbabwe’s president Emmerson Mnangagwa, reportedly as a show of her support for the women and their role in rebuilding the country.