African elephant programme: objectives

WWF’s elephant interventions are organised around 4 objectives

Objective 1 (Protection and Management):
To reduce the illegal killing of elephants through improved protection and management WWF will support activities such as:

• equipping and training law enforcement teams so they can conduct regular and effective anti-poaching patrols
• establishing new protected areas within elephant range and improving management effectiveness within existing protected areas
• developing new community-based wildlife management schemes that contribute to elephant conservation whilst providing benefits to local people
• determining the population status of elephants in sites across Africa.

Objective 2 (Capacity Building):
To increase capacity within range states to conserve and manage elephants WWF will support activities such as:

• helping range state governments produce and adopt sub-regional elephant conservation strategies and national elephant conservation strategies
• developing capacity to survey, census and monitor elephant populations and to implement the CITES system for Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE)
• providing training in elephant conservation and management techniques
• updating and enforcing range states’ legislation to protect elephants.

Objective 3 (Conflict Mitigation):
To increase public support for elephant conservation by reducing conflict WWF will support activities such as:

• training wildlife managers and local communities to work with modern methods and tools to mitigate human-elephant conflict
• analysing human-elephant conflict projects to draw lessons and refine methodologies.

Objective 4 (Trade Controls):
To reduce the illegal trade in elephant products, WWF will support activities such as:

• monitoring and assessing trends in the illegal trade in elephant products (such as implementing the CITES Elephant Trade Information System)
• conducting surveys to provide information on domestic ivory markets.