Five governments agree to create Africa's largest Trans-frontier park.

December 2006. The cornerstone for Africa’s largest Trans-frontier conservation area (TFCA), the Kavango-Zambezi TFCA has been agreed with the signing of a memorandum of understanding by the 5 participating countries, ministers from Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe signed the Memorandum of Understanding during a ceremony at the Victoria Falls Hotel in Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.

 

The Kavango-Zambezi TFCA is situated in the Okavango and Zambezi river basins where the borders of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe converge. It will span an area of approximately 287,132 km², almost the size of Italy, and will include 36 national parks, game reserves, community conservancies and game management areas. Most notably the area will include the Caprivi Strip, Chobe National Park, the Okavango Delta (the largest Ramsar Site in the World) and the Victoria Falls (World Heritage Site and one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World). The KAZA TFCA promises to be southern Africa’s premier tourist destination with the largest contiguous population of the African elephant (approximately 250,000) in the continent. Conservation and tourism are therefore seen as the vehicle for socio-economic development of the region.

To provide guidance on the way forward in developing the TFCA and identifying suitable projects for implementation, the governments of the five participating countries commissioned a pre-feasibility study, facilitated and co-funded by Peace Parks Foundation, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Netherlands and the Rufford Maurice Laing Foundation. The study sets out specific targets for implementation in the process of the TFCA’s formal establishment through the signing of a treaty between the partner countries before 2010.

The Kavango-Zambezi TFCA is one of 20 existing and potential trans-frontier conservation areas in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.