In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught. - Baba Dioum

Most people would have heard of the Kruger National Park. It is a world famous game reserve in South Africa that is the size of Wales and home to some of the most magnificent wildlife the world has to offer. Animals like lion, leopard, elephant and wild dog all call the Kruger their home. Every year people flock from all over the world, paying thousands of pounds to see its many wonders.

But on the edge of the famous Kruger National Park, live some of the world's poorest communities. Many lack basic amenities like electricity and running water and extreme poverty has ravaged the area.

That same poverty leads people to make desperate and bad decisions, decisions like the poaching of wildlife in the surrounding parks like Kruger. Whether that be for meat or for the "commodities" which the animal possesses. There is one animal in particular that is getting wiped off the face of the earth right before our eyes.

Just ten years ago there were over 10,000 rhino within Kruger National Park. The vast majority were white rhino, with a small population of black rhino too. A decade later and their combined total is thought to be around 3,500. That is a population decline of 70% in the space of ten years! It doesn't take a genius to work out that on that trend, it won't be long before the rhino is extinct in Kruger National Park. Once by far the world's largest population of the iconic species, gone in a lifetime, poached for nothing more than the keratin horn on its head. A horn with no medicinal value what so ever but is now worth more than gold!

Our friends at Nourish Eco Village, based at Acornhoek on the edge of Kruger, are doing all that they can to tackle the poaching crisis but not through the typical means of Anti-Poaching Units and high tech security measures. Nourish are tackling poaching by dealing with the root cause, the dire poverty that drives people to poach in the first place.

Their method is to create sustainable development within the communities that they work in and to tackle the huge problems that poverty brings like lack of education, food security and high levels of unemployment. Through doing this they also aim to connect these communities to the natural world around them and bridge the gap between communities and conservation.

Many of the people that live alongside Kruger National Park and it's surrounding private game reserves have never been inside the gates. People that live a stones throw away have never seen elephants or lions as they cannot afford the entrance fee. These marginalised communities have been kept from their own wildlife heritage due to financial restraints.

Nourish run an extensive environmental education programme, part of which consists of running primary school field trips into Kruger National Park and other immersive conservation experiences. However these trips run at a large cost, made worse by having to rent a minibus each time.

Connected Planet Foundation are campaigning to raise funds to buy Nourish their own field trip mini bus. This will lower the cost of the trips drastically, meaning more trips being run and more children being exposed to the natural world around them. Like Baba Dioum, we firmly believe that what people love they will protect, so it is vitally important to get as many young people on these trips as possible.

We believe that through building that love and interconnectedness to nature, children will grow up wanting to protect wildlife rather than kill it, so that humans and wildlife can co-exist for generations to come. The Ubuntu bus will go along way towards making this happen.