Safeguarding the planet: Wildlife conservation

African Parks -Odzala-Kokoua National Park, Republic of Congo

African Parks is a non-profit conservation organisation, founded in 2000, that takes on the complete responsibility for the rehabilitation and long-term management of national parks and protected areas in partnership with governments and local communities. Our aim is to rehabilitate each park, making them ecologically, socially and financially sustainable long into the future, for the benefit of people and wildlife.
 

  
At the close of 2018, African Parks had fifteen parks under management in nine countries, covering 10.5 million hectares (40,540 square miles) and representing seven of the eleven ecological biomes in Africa. This is the largest and most ecologically diverse amount of land under protection for any one NGO on the continent.

The Bennink Foundation is supporting African Parks for a three-year period, starting in 2019, to help realize the infrastructure required for two decentralized law enforcement bases at Odzala-Kokoua National Park in Congo. The aim is to reduce the extraction of illegal wildlife from the park by strengthening the law enforcement in the eastern and northern sector of this vast rainforest park. Odzala still harbors some of the world’s most significant populations of forest elephants and western lowland gorilla.