About the Wildlife Ranger Challenge: 

COVID-19 has brought tourism revenue to a halt across Africa, threatening the important work and livelihoods of the rangers who protect iconic African wildlife such as elephants, pangolins, rhinos, lions, and more. Ranger teams are now uniting around the Wildlife Ranger Challenge, a running race with one goal: to raise money to support thousands of their fellow rangers. Now is the time to go the extra mile—it’s time to race to support our rangers. Every dollar donated will be matched by the Scheinberg Relief Fund, doubling your generous contribution.

Your contribution will help support 42 rangers and an estimated 450 livelihoods in and around the Thuma Forest Reserve in Malawi.

The role of rangers:

Rangers are responsible for law enforcement in forest reserves as well as collecting daily wildlife data. Patrols are on foot across the forests every day of the year, detecting and controlling illegal activities threatening wildlife and their habitat. Our intelligence unit investigates wildlife and environmental crimes related to the reserves, supported by an informer network. Rangers also work closely with the community to promote peaceful human-elephant coexistence.

How your donation will help:

Additional funding would allow rangers to go into lock down for a few months as COVID-19 transmission rates in Malawi increase. This would protect them from contacting the virus and therefore protect our conservation efforts. This would, however, increase our budget by approximately 6 days per ranger per month. This would then also require additional patrol rations per ranger and ease their expenditure so salaries could be used for the families. We would also wish to supply each rangers’ family with COVID-19 care pack including soap, masks etc and provide each ranger with a personal COVID-19 care kit and first aid kit—currently each ranger has only one mask and we have not supplied any to their families.

Effects of the pandemic:

For over four months we have been actively dealing with the growing COVID-19 crisis in Malawi, while at the same time the country has experienced much political unrest. We have had to constantly adapt our day-to day-operations, increasing the number of days working of rangers, change rotas, change teams, increase long patrols in response to increased illegal activities, supply increased rations for rangers, introduce awareness and training on COVID-19 and set up procedures to follow and supply personal care kits. We have had to expand our patrol areas while at the same time maintain current patrols. Ranger training has been stalled, new equipment delivery stalled. Our community projects have been maintained but plans to expand stalled and we have had to reduce interaction with communities, while at the same time trying to ensure they are aware of the virus and supply small COVID-19 care packages for all our ongoing project clubs, all of this at additional unplanned costs.

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Tusk is registered with JustGiving in the UK (or GoFundMe.com in the USA). Our online fundraising sites allow you to create a sponsorship form with easy access for your supporters, knowing their money is going directly to Tusk. UK tax-paying donors can enhance their contribution by agreeing to Gift Aid their sponsorship (for every £10 you raise, Tusk will receive another £2.50 from the Government provided you are a UK taxpayer). US supporters wishing to make a tax deductible donation can do so via GoFundMe.com.