Resource 5: Hammer Simwinga

 Teacher resource for planning or adapting to use with pupils

Saving wildlife in Zambia leads to increased riches for villagers

In 1994, Hammer Simwinga arrived in Mpika, a remote village in northeast Zambia. At that time farming was struggling, and poaching had supplanted crops as a money-earner. Nearby NorthLuangwaNational Park had lost more than 15,000 elephants, thousands of antelope and buffalo and all its black rhinos – slain for their tusks, their meat and their horns.

Simwinga was a travelling agronomist (an expert in soil management and field-crop production). He drifted being an agricultural extension agent, or adult teacher, to volunteer gardening adviser for Catholic parishioners. To his job in Mpika, with the North Luangwa Conservation Project, he mostly brought a big heart and a grab bag of farming tips.

‘There was an office, some computers and a few trucks outside,’ Simwinga, 45, said recently. ‘And I said, “Hey – I think this is an opportunity for me.”’

That it was. In May 2007, Simwinga became one of six winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize, a $125,000 award recognising ‘sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk.’ It is the world's largest and most prestigious environmental award.

Thirteen years of work by Simwinga have turned around the lives of 2,000 families around Mpika, touching perhaps 35,000 people. He has helped hold poaching in NorthLuangwaPark, once rampant, to a near standstill.

‘There are few people in Zambia who understand the value of conservation and have the commitment,’ said Rolf Shenton, a former member of the Zambian parliament. ‘Hammer really dedicated himself to the equation of getting people happy and reducing their antagonism toward wildlife.’

Describing Simwinga's work is easy: He shows rural Zambians that there are better ways to get ahead than by killing animals. Doing it well is another matter.

The LuangwaValley, the southernmost tip of the Great Rift Valley, was a wildlife paradise until the 1970s, when economic distress and a booming ivory trade turned it into a killing field. In the 1980s, 100,000 of the valley elephants perished. The number of elephants in NorthLuangwaNational Park, a 6,200-sq km (2,400-sq mi) preserve, dropped from 17,000 to 1,300.

In 1986, two American zoologists, Mark and Delia Owens, came to Luangwa to study lions, and found poaching so pervasive that elephants were being shot almost nightly within earshot of their camp.

They set up a project to give local residents alternatives to working for the many commercial poachers in the area. A German zoological society financed antipoaching units to patrol the park, and helped establish the North Luangwa Conservation Project, which offered medical care, schooling, job training and loans to start farming.

And slowly, poaching began to ebb. By 1994, poachers were taking fewer than 15 elephants from the North Luangwa park annually.

Enter Hammerskjoeld Simwinga. In the late 1980s, Hammer earned an agriculture degree, then took a job as an extension agent.

‘This is where I first encountered a lot of poaching,’ he said, ‘but I could do nothing because it wasn't in my mandate to control it.’

Frustrated, he quit his government post, and worked several farming jobs before coming to Mpika, and the Owenses. Having reduced poaching, the Owenses needed someone to help would-be poachers toward a better life.

‘After we hired Hammer, the programme just took off,’ Delia Owens said. ‘He had a way of communicating the concept to the villagers – a way of letting them understand that we were working for them as much as we were for the wildlife.’

Simwinga formed ‘wildlife clubs’, co-ops that lent cash to villagers to open stores, run grinding mills or grow crops. He taught farmers tricks, from digging fishponds to planting hedgerows, that increased crop yields and provided new food sources.

But for his perseverance, the effort might have collapsed. In 1996, after poachers had raided the project, Simwinga took it over.

‘That's when he became a real hero,’ Delia Owens said. ‘Hammer had no money; they took his bicycle, everything. He had to walk to these villages–’ (often 30 km or 20 miles, at a time) ‘–to see people.’

Said Simwinga: ‘I didn't want to lose the history and the name we'd made for ourselves. That's why I continued.’

In 1999, with help from an environmental charity, Simwinga expanded his wildlife clubs to 56 villages. He teaches sustainable farming, offers business advice, supports conservation education and even supplies medical necessities to traditional midwives. The Goldman Environmental Foundation, which sponsors the prize, estimates that Simwinga's work has increased participant incomes a hundredfold and doubled family food supplies.

A few kilometres from Mpika, Simwinga stood one morning in the cornfield of Emeldah Mweemba, a 36-year-old mother of four, and explained how a reedy plant there improved production.

Partly by growing the plant, Mweemba figures to increase her corn harvest to 4,000 kg this year, up from 2,300 kg in 2005. But that is not all: her farm has a compost heap, two fishponds, a beehive and coriander bushes that provide animal feed and nectar, and hinder soil erosion. She no longer clears fields by burning, which wastes nutrients, and she recycles chicken and cow manure for fertiliser.

Simwinga says he is a bit awed by his $125,000 prize, and besieged by new friends who want to share it. He is uncertain how the money will be used.

Former poachers now come to Simwinga, he says, seeking business strategies and sustainable farming tips. ‘They're seeing that their friends are doing better than they are stealing meat from the bush,’ he said, grinning.