CE: Expand on what diversification of income means, please. I'm aware that the Care for Wild strategy isn't just focused on preserving animals, but also people. So tell me a bit more about how you and the community have worked together through these challenging times of lockdown?
CdBA: We look at our communities not as sitting outside the fence and we on the inside and the rhinos are inside and we've got to protect the rhinos from the communities. We have a different approach. Our approach is that we see the communities as really good partners.
The two things they have in abundance is they have human capital- young youths that are hungry for work. And then they've got land. So we partnered through the tribal authority through a trust that owns a specific farm called Crystal Stream and we put together a commercial venture a company, a PTY limited company, which we operate as this commercial farming venture we work through and we share the profits 50/50.
So from the community side, they give the land. They give the youth to do the work, which the farm will pay for. We train that youth and at the moment our partnership with Investec is amazing because now we've expanded it from just conservation work where in the past we've trained people as conservation workers and game scouts we're now training agriculture and we want to we going to get that accredited as well.
Our aim is to supply vegetables to the local market when I say the market we're looking at getting into the Spars and the Pick 'n Pay's and supplying the community through developing small enterprises where we give them a bit of credit on products and then they sell it and, that's worked well now.
From an employment side, I think something which is sometimes overlooked, is the number of people that we employ. We've got quite a lot of older people which are permanent staff but the Investec groups come in they get trained they go on a year’s stipend and then we pick out the best and they will then get permanent jobs on the farm.
But you know, if you employ a single youth and he goes home to a family where there's no income and he takes his wage he basically makes sure that the whole family survives and that they actually flourish.
And we've got some examples where you've got a small village where everybody was unemployed and employed four of them or five of them when you go there six months later you find that they growing vegetables and that their whole life has improved. So, it's actually quite...it's rewarding to us to see what the effects are on them.
But in the long-term, our aim is to have a very successful vegetable and fruit and pigs. But the aim is the 50% profit that comes to Care for Wild is used to fund the reserve and our whole sanctuary and the other 50% goes back to the community.
So what if you can look at it another way and what it means is that the communities are actually going to fund Care for Wild sanctuary because through their property and their labour and our donors and our expertise, we are able to fund these reserves and at the same time build communities around us.
PN: So, just to add there you know people with purpose are happy people and it's an inspiration to be around them. They have so much energy and so it's definitely for us saving rhinos to save people to save tomorrow and the future.
So starting with rhinos opened my eyes on how we can save people and giving them hope for the long term and for the journey.