Overview
Promoting sustainable conservation solutions at scale.
Modern Africa’s rapid social and economic change is causing widespread environmental degradation. Population growth, urbanization, and an expanding middle class lead to increasing consumer demand for nature-based products such as food, water, and energy. While this dynamic fuels business opportunity, it puts ever-increasing pressure on natural ecosystems. Meanwhile, the lack of economic activity in rural areas is pushing poor Africans into unsustainable income-earning activities such as poaching and charcoal production.
African Wildlife Foundation has always placed people at the heart of its conservation approach. In modern Africa, economic opportunity or the lack thereof, is the primary driver of ecosystem damaging behavior. AWF has, therefore, long recognized the role that the private sector has to play in supporting scalable, sustainable conservation solutions.
After 20 years of pioneering at the interface of business and conservation, AWF knows first-hand that business is a powerful tool for catalyzing much needed funding into conservation efforts and providing incentives that promote alternatives to the damaging behaviors that cause ecosystem degradation.
AWF's impact investing approach provides investment and conservation expertise to businesses that have unrealized potential to strengthen ecosystems and expand economic opportunity for rural Africans. In doing so, impact investing takes AWF’s work to a new scale and uses the capacity of Africa’s burgeoning private sector to do more, in more places, for the benefit of conservation and people.