For more than 15 years, the Wilderness Safaris Wildlife Trust has supported a wide variety of wildlife management, research and education projects in southern Africa. These projects address the needs of existing wildlife populations, seek solutions to save endangered species and provide education and training for local people and their communities.

To make a difference to Africa, its wildlife and people is the main goal that underscores all the projects which the Trust helps to fund, making use of a number of methods and types of project to do so. One kind of project studies and monitors a particular species in its natural environment and in so doing also contributes to its protection. The Maputaland Turtle Project in South Africa and the Cape Griffon Vulture Project in Namibia are cases in point. Moving beyond research into hands-on management is another variation on this theme: the Rhino Relocation Project in the Okavango Delta has had incredible success with re-establishing this endangered species into the Mombo area.

Study of a species sounds like a purely academic pursuit, but within such investigation lie the seeds for its protection and survival. The better we understand a species and its world, the more efficiently we'll be able to protect it in a world where the struggle for space becomes paramount and human-animal interactions become increasingly conflicted. Most of the Trust's projects have this as an ultimate objective and some amazing headway has been made, for example in the Lake Ngami Bird Monitoring Project, which brought the Lake to the attention of the Botswana government, resulting in its being declared a "no-hunting area".

Wilderness Safaris Wildlife Trust is involved financially in a number of such projects, supporting research, habitat management, and reproductive science, while Wilderness Safaris contributes logistically in terms of human resources and equipment.

But conservation of flora and fauna is limited as long as the people who live in the vicinity are unconvinced or left out of the process. Financial and educational empowerment of local communities so that they benefit from the wildlife on their doorsteps is therefore vital., and as such, broad-based and comprehensive initiatives are in fact the bedrock of the Trust, providing skills and knowledge necessary to communities to value and manage their wildlife populations.

Wilderness Safaris is acknowledged as a leader in the educational process thanks to its innovative formal and informal education projects, supported by the Trust. The Children in the Wilderness and Rural Schools programmes both aim to educate the youth of Africa, inspiring and assisting them to preserve their magnificent natural heritage.