Three ethnic groups; Khwe and !Xun (of San descent), and Hambukshu (of Bantu descent) live in the 200 kilometre-long stretch of Bwabwata National Park, which is bordered by Angola to the north, Botswana to the south, the Okavango River to the west and the Kwandu River to the east. The Khwe San, who make up 82% of the park’s population, are the ancestral people of West Caprivi, but currently do not have legally recognized rights or title over the land. For over 20,000 years, their hunter-gatherer lifestyle allowed them to make a living form the semi-arid woodlands and surrounding rivers. They continue to collect veld foods and use a variety of other resources including honey, reeds, grasses and wood. Park’s resident communities are advocating for improved resource and access rights to the natural resources in the park.
Conventional livelihood strategies, such as subsistence farming, are challenged by the park’s high wildlife population. Elephants, which outnumber (!!) people in the park, raid crops and predators capture livestock. The remote, rural location of the park, over 1,000 kilometers from Namibia’s capital city, Windhoek, further hampers the communities’ ability to obtain employment.
However, Bwabwata National Park’s residents are sitting on a proverbial gold mine – the combined value of trophy hunting, community-based tourism and commercial sale of highly valuably medicinal plants in the Park present unique opportunities for income generation that could outweigh the value of income from more conventional sources. But at this stage not much of this ‘goldmine’ is accessible to benefit the resident community, the project is striving to obtain benefits.
68% of park residents have received no formal education. Only 14% of residents have attended primary school, and 11% of the total population has continued to secondary school. 90% of the population consists of unemployed subsistence farmers.
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