Our Aims and Objectives

Mwabvi is a small and beautiful Reserve, only 135 km² with over 60,000 people living close to its boundaries in what is a remote part of southern Africa. You can see the Reserve map here It is very fragile and has lost most of its animals, so PAW Trust shares the PAW Malawi team’s long term objectives :

Conservation/ Protection

Our objective is to protect the physical wilderness. This means we fence it to protect the wilderness and the animals, a major task. We repair the tracks, make more trails and provide a campsite with water and facilities inside the Reserve. And we control access, which means we promote the building of a road around the Reserve.

Re introduction of Mammals

Our objective is to repopulate Mwabvi with the animals that used to live there, like Black Rhino and Elephant. Beyond this we obtain animals from other Malawi reserves – but the cost of transportation is high, and we also need to buy in some stock for breeding. We can ‘swap’ our surplus stock over time with other National Parks.

Development

Our objective is to protect Mwabvi by educating the local and global communities about the reserve and conservation, and by providing immediate benefits for local people.

Involving local people

The Traditional Authority structure is very important to us, the Group Village Headman and Village Headmen near our base have been very supportive and we respect their traditional decision making processes. Through them we are able to develop jobs and business opportunities for local people.

Developing a major conservation training facility over time

This is for the benefit of Malawi as well as to support our work, and is based on the belief that we can teach small groups of international visitors about Mwabvi and use their payments to fund some of our work. It’s about introducing responsible and controlled tourism.

Promoting education in conservation in the UK and Malawi

We have twinned UK and Malawi universities and have started to develop an education programme with schools and youth groups in the UK. This is part of our long term aim to help protect our global environment. In Malawi the conservation team are already organising school visits to the reserve for local children who have never visited it.