1 · Position
Wild Impact works in 78 communities across six countries — South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Botswana and Namibia — and since 2024 in Asia and South America. Its founding proposition was that conservation of wild land depends on the prosperity of the people living beside it, and that a lodge is the mechanism by which one can fund the other.
2 · Why it is in the Library
It invented the model. Founded a year after andBeyond itself, it established the pattern that a luxury operator maintains a separate, non-distributing body which the lodges fund and the communities direct — the projects are identified by the community, not by the operator. Every safari group now runs some version of it. The Library admits on authorship, and this is authorship.
3 · The renaming
The change to Wild Impact in December 2024 was not cosmetic. Africa Foundation had followed andBeyond into Asia and South America, and a name naming one continent had stopped being true. It is a useful reminder for the register: a body can be twenty years old and still change what it is called.
4 · Candour
The Library records the model, not a verdict on its results. Community-partnership programmes attached to luxury operators are contested — the criticism is that they make the operator the arbiter of what a community needs, and that the funding stops when the tourism does. Wild Impact answers the first by having communities identify projects; it has no answer to the second, and neither does anyone else. Figures for communities and countries are the organisation’s own.