The reason behind every Joubert film is conservation. They started filmmaking as a way to get that message out, and that ethic is reflected in everything they do, in all their films and books. Each project also shows a deep appreciation of the beauty, and understanding of wild Africa.

“It is my firm belief that what we have learnt since Darwin and Wallace is that islands and the wildlife on them are vulnerable. The smaller the island the more likely an extinction in the future. What we have done in African wildlife management is divide up free ranges and make them into islands of safe zones surrounded by wildlife hostile blocks, be they hunting, ranching, farming or civilization. If any effort at all is to be put into conservation it has to go towards linking these islands again, joining them up and recreating home ranges and natural migration routes. This can't happen without everyone's help, from governments to local communities to the commercial sector." Dereck continues, "However to insist that wildlife and nature pay for their existence is very short-sighted. Beverly adds; “We believe that the African landscape is a wonderful and beautiful thing. Mankind is also wonderful and we’re tremendously hopeful that we equipped with the knowledge, facts and increased appreciation we will understand that we are a part of nature not apart from it. If we can play a small role in getting that knowledge out or inspiring people, we will have succeeded.”

THE BIG CATS INITIATIVE

Lions and big cats in general have been a passion for the Jouberts for more than thirty years and their work has followed the conservation of lions via films, books, National Geographic Magazine articles and a range of other work. It was when they became Explorers in Residence, at National Geographic, that they looked back at their life’s work and realized that inspiring people about the beauty of big cats was not
Having a big enough effect. They approached National Geographic with their startling findings after sifting through the numbers. In 50 years, lions have dropped in number from 450,000 to around 15,000. Leopards have gone from 700,000 to about 50,000 and there are fewer that 7,000 wild cheetah.

As a result, Dereck and Beverly started the Big Cats Initiative with National Geographic as an emergency action plan to reverse that trend, Since 2009, the initiative has made a significant impact. The BCI has so far issued grants to over 150 projects in 29 countries reduced the threats for almost 3 thousand big cats in the wild, 2 thousand Livestock enclosures built, reducing human-wildlife conflict with big cats, and 13 thousand life- threatening snares removed from big cat habitats, and continues to search for innovative projects that can substantially change the way lion conservation is carried out.

THE GREAT PLAINS FOUNDATION BIG CATS INITIATIVE

After 13 years, the National Geographic Big Cats Initiative is celebrating its successes, understanding its experiments, and making a change to a fully managed, marketed and run NGO under the Great Plains foundation umbrella.  Conservationists and big cat specialists Dereck & Beverly Joubert, who founded the Big Cats Initiative (BCI) and have also founded the Great Plains Foundation, are now consolidating all their conservation and community efforts under one umbrella for even greater reach for solutions to halt the decline of big cats in the wild.

PROJECT REWILD ZAMBEZI

A list of animals included in this document is in need of a new home, and Great Plains has a 280,000-acre private concession along Zimbabwe’s Zambezi River, called the Sapi Reserve. It is the perfect solution for many reasons. This reserve forms the middle-Zambezi biosphere, totalling 1.6 million acres. From the 1950s until we took it over in 2017, decades of hunting had decimated wildlife populations in Sapi Reserve. We are rewilding and restoring the wild back to what it once was.

We are about to embark on one of the largest wildlife relocations in Southern Africa’s history.

NEW PROJECT ANNOUNCEMENT:  ALL-FEMAIL RANGER UNITS

'Impossible' is not a word in our Great Plains vocabulary (showcased by the start of our ambitious Project Rewild Zambezi, moving 3,000 animals across Zimbabwe). Nor should it be for anyone, particularly women, who want to be on the front lines of conservation.

Poaching continues to be a threat in Africa and having boots on the ground is essential. The ranger industry has been dominated by men, but that is changing.  

Great Plains' Female Ranger Program is training and deploying female rangers in ecologically significant areas in Botswana (Okavango Delta) and Zimbabwe (Sapi Reserve in the Zambezi Valley). This give woman an opportunity to empower themselves and to be part of the solution in protecting their wildlife and community.    These female rangers work to mitigate wildlife crime as well as collecting data and monitoring natural resources in these critical areas.

Stop a Poacher. Sponsor a Ranger. Save a Species

Read the Q3 Project Ranger Impact Report here

Click Here to Donate

Project Ranger Part 1

Project Ranger Part 2

Project Ranger Part 3

Project Ranger Part 4

Project Ranger Part 5

Project Ranger Part 6

Project Ranger Part 7

Project Ranger Part 8

Project Ranger Part 9

Project Ranger Part 10

For more information please visit:  Project Ranger

CONSERVATION ROOTS

SOLAR MAMAS PROJECT

THE SOLAR MAMAS PROGRAM TRAINS RURAL, ILLITERATE, AND SEMI-LITERATE WOMEN TO BRING SOLAR ELECTRIFICATION SYSTEMS TO THEIR OFF-GRID VILLAGES.

The project reduces poverty and provides an opportunity through access to electricity, advances gender equality by supporting women to become entrepreneurs, and ensures environmentally sustainable solutions are integral to the progress made. The Solar Mamas initiative offers the unique potential to foster intersectional innovation in rural communities and to initiate significant change for generations to come.

Through a partnership with the Barefoot College, our Solar Mamas project builds upon the deep and long-standing relationships Great Plains has with rural communities in Botswana’s Okavango Delta region to provide local women with job skills and entrepreneurial assistance in the sustainable energy sector. The Solar Mamas initiative empowers local women to improve their economic prospects while providing a much-needed service to their communities through solar-powered electrical systems. This program is a second chance for women.

Solar Mamas participants are all women over age 30 who are established in their communities. They leave their rural villages in Africa to attend a five-month training program in India. The training teaches these women to build, install, and maintain solar panels and batteries to provide a renewable source of energy to their communities. When their training is complete, the women return to their villages and begin processing orders from families requesting home lighting systems. Each solar engineer uses her newly gained skills and knowledge to install and maintain these systems. She is empowered to establish and run a business that provides sustainable energy and leads to increased opportunity and self-sufficiency for her community.

Through our enduring ties to the local communities, Great Plains identified nine women from five villages to participate in this first round of Solar Mamas training with Barefoot College. We are proud to say that these nine women returned home in February 2020 after the successful completion of their training, and they are now at work establishing their businesses.

Our vision is to continue to recruit new classes of women each year and to scale our success to communities in the other countries where we operate, including Kenya and Zimbabwe. We rely on charitable support and partners to support our community initiatives that elevate women, giving them the opportunity for a prosperous life that inspires whole community change.

For  more information please visit:  Solar Mamas

GREAT PLAINS CONSERVATION

The Jouberts have joined forces with some dynamic and successful partners, to create a company that has its basic mission in the words ‘Conservation Tourism”.

Great Plains is a conservation initiative that uses the best assets of lightest footprint tourism to re-establish areas, to enhance natural habitats and to expand wild places. In association with parks national parks and game reserves, buffer zones can be created and these iconic places of the world can be given a helping hand.

Dereck is presently CEO of Great Plains and hopes to take the present 1 million acres of wild land under management to at least twice that in a few years.

“We must assume that governments have the parks under control. What we can do is attach to the boundaries of those parks, enhance them, protect them and play a role in buffering or protecting those parks themselves.  We’re identifying key corridors and working to lease land in these linking areas, especially for predator protection reasons.”

Areas currently targeting on conservation:

BOTSWANA’S SELINDA RESERVE

The Selinda Reserve is a 350,000 acre private wildlife sanctuary in the northern part of Botswana run by Great Plains. It is centred around the famous Selinda Spillway which snakes its way through the reserve, linking the outer reaches of the Okavango Delta in the west with the Linyanti Swamps in the east - a truly spectacular and unique landscape.

It is also home to over 9,000 elephants amongst other wildlife but the main reason for the Joubert’s purchasing the lease on Selinda was to turn it from a hunting area into viable conversation and photographic tourism.

“When we took over just a few years ago, 80% of the land at Selinda was used for trophy hunting. On our first day of tenure we stopped all the hunting and since have seen a tremendous difference as the wildlife has responded in kind. Elephants sensed the change and now calmly drink as you pass by. Lion numbers have increased, Painted dogs den at Selinda and Cheetah do well,  and in general the whole area seems to now breathe a deep sigh of relief.”

The camps Great Plains run there are as sustainable and as green as they can be: solar powered, and heated, even vehicles drive on recycled cooking oil.  The famous Zarafa camp is their flagship camp, a place where the Jouberts first camped and filmed 20 years ago.

Great Plains is involved in Kenya at ol Donyo Lodge, adjoining the Chylu Hills, Park and overlooking Amboseli, with a camp in the OOC private conservancy adjoining the Masai Mara, inside the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania.

Visit Great Plains Conservation for more information.

LIONS

Lions and big cats in general have been a passion for the Jouberts for more than thirty years and their work has followed the conservation of lions via films, books, National Geographic Magazine articles and a range of other work. It was when they became Explorers in Residence, at National Geographic, that they looked back at their life’s work and realized that inspiring people about the beauty of big cats was not having a big enough effect. They approached National Geographic with their startling findings after sifting through the numbers. In the last 50 years, the population of lions has decreased from 450,000 to around 20,000, since the 1950s. Leopards have gone from 700,000 to about 50,000 and there are fewer that 12,000 wild cheetah.

As a result, Dereck and Beverly started the Big Cats Initiative with National Geographic as an emergency action plan to reverse that trend, Since 2009, the initiative has made a significant impact.  The BCI has so far issued grants to over 150 projects in 28 countries reduced the threats for almost 3 thousand big cats in the wild, 2 thousand Livestock enclosures built, reducing human-wildlife conflict with big cats, and 13 thousand life-threatening snares removed from big cat habitats, and continues to search for innovative projects that can substantially change the way lion conservation is carried out.

Visit Great Plains Foundation - Lions  / Big Cats Initiative for more information.

ELEPHANTS

We support living in harmony with elephants and believe that they are not here for us to use, or kill. It is consistent with our policy towards all wildlife and indeed people. Let’s find ways to live with elephants, and each other, to help communities live with elephants and to make the world better through harmony. Let’s establish corridors, and methods to protect farmers and villagers, without exposing them to angry wounded or persecuted elephants. And let’s find ways to include communities in the real benefits of African ecosystems more and more, in a reasonable and sensible way.

One such example is, through our relationship with villagers who are members of Ecoexist in Eretsha the Great Plains Foundation is able to bring guests to their Life With Elephants Tour. This has benefited the participating community both financially and through a meaningful cultural exchange with international guests.

Visit Great Plains Foundation - Elephants for more information.

RHINOS

The recent increase in rhino poaching and the media coverage of that, highlights a growing problem in Africa, where greed has created a second pandemic, one that threatens all animals, but rhinos in particular are being slaughtered.  Seizures of illegal wildlife products focus on three or four species, rhinos, elephants, pangolins and big cats.  In an attempt to focus attention on these species, Wildlife Films will continue to produce short films, television documentaries, feature length and impact media on these threatened species.

Rhino Rescue produced by Dereck and Beverly, is an early Impact Film, but each film they have produced over the past twenty years or more has a strong conservation message. In 2008 they made a transition from just writing and filming with a message to funding and carrying out conservation projects. The first was the formation of The Big Cats Initiative with  National Geographic, now with over 150 projects across nearly 30 countries. Shortly after that, the Great Plains Foundation was started to branch out beyond big cats and into community work.

This is now ongoing, distributing over $2 million a year in projects. Rhinos without Borders, where they moved 87 rhinos from high poaching zones to low risk areas in 2016 onwards. More recently we identified  a need during COVID 19 lockdowns to fund rangers who had been let go, and get them back in the field through Project Ranger, now with projects in 9 countries. Wildlife Films is now a hybrid of media, filmmaking, impact and cause related initiatives, conservation and community work.  

For more information visit http://www.rhinoswithoutborders.com/

EDUCATION

Earth Academy

The Great Plains Earth Academy is building upon the important relationships Great Plains Conservation and its Foundation have developed to engage local young people and adults in northern Botswana in a variety of programs that provide supplemental education, vocational skills, and scholarships.

Leveraging the resources of Great Plains Conservation, the government of Botswana, and local public and private partnerships, the Great Plains Earth Academy provides personal and community enrichment opportunities for local youth and adults in Botswana’s Okavango Delta through vocational training and conservation education programs.

The goals of the academy are to improve participants’ understanding of their local environment and wildlife, promote conservation and sustainable land management practices, and invest in improving the skill and capacity of the local community and workforce. All programs seek to serve the individual while imparting respect for the natural heritage and a solid conservation ethic.

Student Conservation Camps

Sustainable conservation is inextricably linked to the communities living among wildlife and protected lands. Without community-supported initiatives, and a focus on the future, lasting conservation legacies are not possible.

For this reason, the Great Plains Foundation has been investing for a decade in the next generation of conservationists through conservation education and the Great Plains’ Student Conservation Camps. This targeted community project operates in Northern Botswana and Kenya’s Masai Mara and ol Donyo / Amboseli region; connecting each year with hundreds of local youth at a pivotal time in their lives. Through thoughtful engagement, the Student Conservation Camps work to instil an appreciation of the landscape, its ecology, and the importance of stewarding the land for future generations. The Student Conservation Camps build a strong case for conservation at a community level while encouraging and developing the next generation of conservation leaders.

Visit. Earth Academy for more information

HUNTING

With so many African species of wildlife on the decline it’s our view that it is no longer acceptable to ‘enjoy’ the killing of animals for sport, recreation, and fun. It has been scientifically proven that trophy hunting of lions causes their decline (Packer et al). It is controversial but we also believe in dialogue and engagement, to understand both sides. Even Teddy Roosevelt ‘collected’ over 1,200 dead animals on a 6-month trip, and Selous, often called the Father of Hunting, addressed a gathering at the Royal Geographic Society in the early 20th century and said that under the use of the modern gun (in 1910) and the poor ethics of hunters, he didn’t expect to see big game in Africa last much longer.

Perhaps this COVID era will teach us of a more compassionate time, where we rewrite our contract with Nature.

Visit Great Plains Foundation - Lions for more information.

WILD PLACES

The wilderness is a state of mind, but it lives in wild places, and as we are seeing, in Selinda where hunting was stopped and the animals have been given a chance to come back in large numbers,  wilderness can be recreated if you put the right conservation methods in place.

Protection of bio-diversity is paramount, as the Joubert’s colleague on the Big Cats Initiative Grants Committee Tom Lovejoy who coined the phrase believes, in managing the world’s ecosystems. Managing for recreation of Wild Places and the Wild Things within them, while we have them still in such rich abundance is what drives the Jouberts.