When talking about wildlife in Africa, there’s one talking point that is always brought up, and that is that any of the wildlife like certain types of rhinos, hippos, big cats and other species are in danger of going extinct. Either through habitat destruction, poaching, or myriad of other unnoticeable acts to us, we humans always have a knack for destroying what took nature billions of years to build. It’s time we put a stop to that and one surprising way to do that, that has been suggested by the Afrigalah team is tourism.
Africa wildlife conservation through tourism
Tourism in these modern times has taken a turn for the worse. Tourism as a concept isn’t so much at fault for this. But rather it’s the fault of us, the people. First of all, there’s not so many of us that are eager to see all the “must see” places in the world, that all the popular vacation spots are overcrowded. There are those popular funny/sad photos of comparisons between expectations and reality when taking a photo in front of the leaning tower of Pisa. Expectation is that you will be all alone there, and be able to take the famous, “I’m toppling over the Leaning Tower of Pisa”, in peace. Reality is that there’s going to be dozens if not hundreds of other people that do that, and you will actually need to wait or fight for a good spot. That kind of gives tourism a bad name.
In Africa tourism gets a bad rep because many people coming to African countries, going to safaris, it all leaves waste, requires resources and again, lots of people means crowds, animals are suffering, it’s all nasty. But we here at Afrigalah think that you can have your cake and eat it too. Many folks are already doing that. Both non-profit and for-profit organizations are trying to find a balance between tourism, and use part of the profits for preventing habitat loss, improving wildlife preservation (from poachers for example) and in general they just work towards turning a bad situation into a good one.
We encourage more people to join the cause and to try and find compromises. There’s no perfect solutions unfortunately. Compromises might not be something that you want to do, but they are necessary in situations like this. Problems with wildlife preservations in Africa are very complex and there’s no easy solutions. That’s why we need to do what needs to be done, instead of what we want to see done. Contact your local wildlife preservation organizations and talk to them about your opinions. Once they see there’s enough support from the people for tourism even in conservation areas (if the profits are used to improve preservation), maybe they will start doing it. Contact us and let us know how it went and if we can help. Best of luck to all of us.