What We Do
Support resilient ecosystems and enhance ecosystem services for communities by using sustainable grazing practices like planned grazing, rotational resting, strategic herding and kraaling. Rangeland restoration is also enhanced by using approaches like reseeding trampled soils and controlling erosion with gabions and brushpacks.
Unlock rangeland and livestock value chains for Herding for Health beneficiaries by providing access to better markets through mobile auctions and abattoirs, commodity-based trade and the sale of wildlife-friendly beef.
Support local and inclusive governance structures for collective decision-making by establishing, or strengthening existing grazing area committees who voluntarily sign rangeland stewardship agreements to support the management of rangelands and livestock in exchange for benefits.
Enable income diversification and community ownership beyond the project lifecycle through blended financing solutions including conservation finance (carbon or biodiversity credits), endowment funds, enterprise development opportunities, grant funding and government programmes. Key to securing sustainability is building and maintaining strategic partnerships that support scale and impact.
Ensure healthier animals in communal areas by supporting improved livestock management and daily monitoring of herd dynamics, animal health care, nutrition, and reproduction. Professional herders are trained to better manage and handle community livestock and provide basic animal health care.
Based on scientific and traditional knowledge, and together with community elders and herders, rotational grazing plans are produced for specific areas that allow soils to rest and rangelands to recuperate.
Herders are trained in reading the landscape and its soil characteristics, applying controlled burning,focusing on spring protection and water retention, and regenerating soil and biodiversity.
As part of the Herding for Health programme, ample attention is paid to the herder’s understanding of animal health, optimising animal genetics and record keeping.
- Planned grazing principles
- Animal production & husbandry
- Primary animal health care
- Wildlife contact management (predators / disease)
- Record-keeping, traceability and auditing
- Community liaison / mobilisation
- Tracking and wildlife protection
- Low-stress handling
Animals are vaccinated, dewormed, and monitored. As a result, fertility rates rapidly increase, and disease transmissions go down, creating healthy and strong herds that produce high-quality and nutrient-rich meat.
For areas where predators are prevalent, possibly the simplest yet most effective solution is the deployment of two-metre-tall mobile tent cloth enclosures we call mobile bomas.
- Easy to erect.
- Hold 450 cattle at a time.
- Cattle overnight in bomas guarded by a group of trained herders.
- Wildlife contact management (predators / disease)
- Predators do not risk jumping over the cloth wall.
- Bomas moved weekly leaving a well-fertilised and trampled spot behind.
- Soils are seeded with harvested seeds from recovered grasslands.
In addition to creating community training and livelihood options, Herding for Health increasingly focuses on job creation and enterprise development. This includes creating cash-for-work programmes that optimise landscape regeneration – by removing harmful invasive species, for instance – or developing value chains from by-products such as wool and leather.
- Improved diets
- Access premium market prices
- Saving plans and banking options.
- Predators do not risk jumping over the cloth wall.
We strengthen existing community governance structures such that site-specific Rangeland Stewardship Agreements can be co-developed and implemented by communities. Community members voluntarily sign stewardship agreements following a free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) process and select an inclusive governance structure to support the management of livestock for rangeland restoration.
Communities take ownership of implementation where best practice is driven and sustained by Herding for Health supported market incentives.
In exchange for implementing sustainable practices, members receive a negotiated benefit package, e.g., access to livestock medicines, supplemental livestock feed, access to market, or capacity building and enterprise development opportunities.
We train local herders through accredited courses to become Professional Herders. These Professional Herders provide the required capacity to support conservation stewardship, planned grazing, rangeland restoration, wildlife conflict mitigation, and improved production. The herders are primarily responsible for continuous data collection as part of site-level monitoring and evaluation processes.
The Professional Herder model has been transformational when it comes to national job creation programmes, and South Africa became the first African country to include professional herders (Ecorangers) as a job creation category within its national job creation programme. Currently, Botswana is moving to do the same through support by the GCF Botswana Project.Additional support is provided to our sites by facilitating knowledge-sharing, partner access, and adoption of innovative technologies such as mobile bomas and monitoring platforms.
We build market readiness and support the development of pro-conservation value-chains to sustain stewardship actions. We drive policy reforms for improved market access for those who farm with best practices in wildlife areas. Through sustained conservation actions, value addition is created, for example by verified carbon sequestration, and wildlife tourism.
Science and research as a platform to inform the measurement of impact and inform implementation and innovations to achieve sustainable outcomes.
We establish systems to monitor the impact of Herding for Health implementation on native rangelands, wildlife, livestock and human well-being. Our three-tiered approach to monitoring incorporates data collected by professional herders, team leaders, project managers, all of which is integrated with remote sensing and collated into a monitoring dashboard.
We don't just monitor, but ensure implementation is adaptive and we learn from the data generated to always push for implementation excellence in all our varied implementation sites.