ECO Office Conservation Delivery Model

Posted on May, 17 2016

WWF Zimbabwe is implementing a five year Conservation Strategy (2015-2020). The goal of the Strategy is to “Contribute to the creation of a Zimbabwe with well managed networks of wild areas that co-exist with a society thriving on a sustainable natural resource based economy by 2020”.
The Strategy is delivered through a Model popularized by the Office in 2009. The Model consists of the following components:
a. Project focused fundraising due to limited opportunities for large scale and long term programme funding. Due to the prevailing socio-political environment in the country, WWF Zimbabwe had limited opportunities to raise programme funding for conservation work;
b. Lean staff compliment as the Office operates on the principle of “Eat what you kill” with respect to personnel recruitment and retention. This allows for Office organic growth as the project portfolio increases and facilitates the allocation of a significant proportion of project budgets to operations rather than overheads;
c. Multi-taskingtoensurethejudicioususeoftheexistingpersonnelcompliment;
d. Strategically working with and through partners (viz. government departments, civil society organizations, academia, media and the private sector) based on comparative advantage. Partnership areas include: socio-economic development; advocacy for institutional and policy change; conservation and resource management; and value addition to natural resource based
products; and,
e. Convening and facilitating various stakeholders for policy engagement and capacity building with
emphasis on landscape thinking, monitoring and evaluation.
Our delivery model is informed by the following realities:
a. Country context: A harsh socio-economic environment that reduced financial inflows to
government and non governmental institutions. This led to the scaling down of investments into
natural resource conservation and management in favour of social services; and,
b. Networkcontext:UncertaintythatsurroundedthefutureoftheWWFZimbabweOffice.
We however remain mindful that a “one size fits all” approach is inappropriate as conservation delivery is generally situation specific. We will therefore continue to review, adapt and improve upon the WWF Zimbabwe conservation delivery model as new realities unfold.