Simwinga, Hammerskjoeld

▪ 2008

born Nov. 17, 1964, Isoka, Zambia

 Zambian conservationist Hammerskjoeld (Hammer) Simwinga was awarded the 2007 Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa. (Founded in 1990 by Richard Goldman and Rhoda Goldman, the Goldman Environmental Prize included a cash award of $125,000 per recipient to grassroots environmentalists from each of the world's six inhabited continental regions.) In announcing the prize, the Goldman organization said, “In an area where rampant illegal wildlife poaching decimated the wild elephant population and left villagers living in extreme poverty, Simwinga created an innovative sustainable community development program that successfully restored wildlife and transformed this poverty-stricken area.” It was not an exaggeration for his admirers to call him a hero.

      Simwinga was named for Dag Hammerskjöld, the United Nations secretary-general who died in a plane crash in Zambia in 1961. Simwinga's father was a medical aide who worked in various regions of Zambia, and Simwinga became fluent in seven African languages. After earning agriculture certificates from the Zambia College of Agriculture and the City and Guilds London Institute (Lusaka, Zambia), he worked as a farm manager.

      Concerned about wildlife poaching, in 1994 he joined the North Luangwa Conservation Project. This organization had been founded in 1986 by Mark Owens and Delia Owens, American zoologists who had gone to the region to study lions but instead turned their attention to the rampant poaching of elephants in North Luangwa National Park. With funding from a German zoological society, they set up antipoaching patrols and began community development projects to give the villagers an alternative to poaching for survival. Simwinga became the main force behind the agricultural development work. He founded “wildlife clubs,” cooperatives that provided business loans and technical assistance to farmers.

      The project was so successful that in 1996 corrupt government officials, who benefited from the poaching, attempted to close it down. The Owenses, away at the time, were advised not to return; the funding stopped, and it fell to Simwinga to keep the work going. This he did with extraordinary energy, working alone for about a year. He established a new organization, the North Luangwa Wildlife Conservation and Community Development Programme, funded by a British charity called Harvest Hope. With additional money from the Owens Foundation, he established beekeeping and fish-farming projects, among other new endeavours.

      By the time Simwinga received the Goldman Prize, sometimes called the environmental Nobel Prize, poaching in North Luangwa Valley had been largely stopped, and wildlife was returning to the area. Moreover, the villagers subsisted on agriculture, from which they earned far more than they had from poaching. Simwinga's work improved the lives of some 35,000 people in 64 villages, and his programs were a model for other regions.

K. Anne Ranson

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