USAID works to conserve Zimbabwe’s most important natural resources, from the Limpopo River and its tributaries to its world-renowned wildlife, making communities more resilient in the face of climate change.
IMPROVING WATER SECURITY
In 2018, USAID launched a five-year regional environmental program called Resilient Waters. Resilient Waters targets the Limpopo River Basin, building more resilient and water-secure communities and ecosystems through improved management of natural resources and increased access to safe drinking water and sanitation services.
Over its lifetime, Resilient Waters will increase access to safe drinking water and sanitation services for nearly 21 million people in South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia. It will also improve the management of trans-boundary natural resources and strengthen ecological infrastructure needed to maintain healthy water systems.
Resilient Waters follows the U.S. Government’s Global Water Strategy, which supports efforts to create a water-secure world where communities can be resilient, retain this essential resource, and foster healthy, prosperous lives.
COMBATING WILDLIFE CRIME
Poaching and illegal wildlife trade remain an alarming threat to the survival of rhino and elephant species in Zimbabwe, resulting in rapidly declining populations and threatening the country’s tourism industry and the livelihoods and security of rural communities.
USAID works to prevent wildlife trafficking through collaborating with communities, increasing cross-border cooperation, and strengthening shared knowledge and law enforcement.
The Support of the South East Lowveld Anti-Poaching activity is a five-year initiative that will reduce wildlife crime and illegal trade across the southeast Lowveld of Zimbabwe and the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area. The activity specifically focuses on developing performance-based community incentives in two key rhino and elephant poaching hotspots, the Save and Bubye Conservancies. This activity is a component of the larger Supporting Community and Law Enforcement against Poaching initiative that promotes within country and cross-border cooperation, enhances policy frameworks, builds capacity for law enforcement and prosecution, improves accountability, and develops community incentives to support combating wildlife crime.
The Combating Wildlife Crime Project (CWCP) is a five-year initiative that will counter threats from transnational wildlife crime to endangered populations of black rhino and African elephants in the Kavango-Zambezi areas and Namibia. Through a multi-partner and multi-country approach, the project aims to improve knowledge of wildlife crime and its impacts and share data and information among law enforcement agencies and civil society in Angola, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Active involvement and strengthening relationships among communities, the private sector, conservation authorities, and law enforcement agencies are critical to fighting wildlife crime.