Rodah Chiawa and her friend Hope Ngulube cling to each other in the small outdoor pool, laughing nervously. It is only the second time they have been in a swimming pool, so the instructor tells them to put on lifejackets before swimming to the deep end. Cue much splashing, squealing, and cheers from their teammates.
“It was kind of fun but so scary – I thought I was going down,” says Ngulube afterwards.
For the next half hour the group practises swimming on their backs, holding their breath and treading water. After a sweltering morning learning to handle tracking dogs in the Lower Zambezi national park, they welcome the chance to cool off and have fun doing relay races.
Chiawa, 25, and Ngulube, 20, are being put through their paces as part of an intense, military-style selection process for an anti-poaching K9 dog unit, but they started as part of Kufadza, the first all-women anti-poaching unit in Zambia. Graduating from Kufadza to the specialist K9 unit means they will have more responsibility and monthly bonuses, a huge draw for young people who were previously unemployed or working in low-paid jobs. This is especially true of women in rural Zambia, who, despite the provisions of the 2019 Employment Code Act, are often underpaid, poorly treated or overlooked entirely.
Both Chiawa and Ngulube were jobless before joining Kufadza. Ngulube says: “I never dreamed I would carry a gun. I looked at it and thought ‘maybe I’ll fire it accidentally and shoot myself.’ I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but [I thought] I’ll just try my best.”
It was the stark gender imbalance in wildlife conservation that prompted Conservation Lower Zambezi (CLZ) to form Kufadza in 2021. The NGO supports the Department of National Parks and Wildlife’s efforts to curtail poaching and other illegal activities in the Lower Zambezi national park in south-eastern Zambia, but also works with communities to manage human-wildlife conflict in the two game management areas that surround the park – buffer zones where people live and work, mostly in subsistence farming.
“We saw that law enforcement in conservation was dominated by men. There were very few women, even though women are interacting [more] with wildlife every day just getting water from the river,” says Peter Longwe, a monitoring and evaluation officer for CLZ. “We want them to be used as ambassadors in their communities.”
The organisation put up posters in local villages and in the town of Chirundu, on the border with Zimbabwe, inviting women to apply to join Kufadza; 500 women responded.
Among them was Stella Siansuna. She says: “When I saw the poster in the market in Chirundu I told my family and they said ‘you can’t apply, it’s a job for men’, so I had to convince them that I had to do it.”
The 500 were whittled down to 96, who were put through fitness tests, including a 5km run, sits-ups and press-ups. Siansuna, 22, who was working as a house help at the time and wasn’t particularly sporty at school, found the tests tough.
“At school, I played chess,” she says. But she made it through to the next round, and was one of just eight women eventually chosen to form Kufadza, which means inspire in the local Goba language.
Less than a month later Siansuna was on patrol in the bush at night when she spotted some poachers who had set up camp in the distance.
“We were very scared but by then I was team leader and had to make a decision. I decided to advance on the camp and the poachers ran away. That’s when I became strong and now I’m not afraid of anything,” she says.
Numbers fluctuate year to year but in 2023 there were 13 members of Kufadza out of a total of 46 community scouts, all of whom were recruited from the two game management areas.
Siansuna has since graduated to the marine squad, which patrols the lower Zambezi River that separates Zambia and Zimbabwe. She is also an instructor for new community scouts. Siansuna says her primary motivation for joining Kufadza was to help her family but she has grown to love the land and wildlife she protects – and the job itself. She thinks nothing of spending 10 days in the bush, walking up to 30km a day carrying a 22kg backpack and an AK47. She says: “The more experience I get, the easier it gets. It’s about being given an opportunity to prove yourself.”
She also feels at ease working alongside her male co-workers, adding: “Sometimes it’s just me and eight men, but there is no problem. We climb the same mountains, walk the same distance.”
Siansuna’s experience of moving up through the ranks reflects CLZ’s ethos: it wants women to progress into specialist units, or leave CLZ to join the Department of National Parks and Wildlife, where they will have the security of a government salary and pension.
A steady turnover also opens up opportunities for new recruits, even if it poses a financial challenge – it costs $2,000 (£1,600) to train a community scout, and funders are demanding more rigorous impact assessment, more visibility on social media and more accountability before releasing money.
“A lot of women are being inspired; every time I’m out I get asked when CLZ is recruiting,” says Siansuna. “They ask ‘how does it happen, do I have to sleep with the instructor?’ I tell them you just have to prove you are physically and mentally fit.”
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CLZ was established in 1994 by safari lodge owners to address rampant poaching in the area. There are no exact figures on the current elephant population in the Lower Zambezi national park but Rabson Tembo, the operations manager for CLZ, says surveys and anecdotal evidence suggest it’s between 2,000 and 3,000. Elephant killings have declined since 2016 when the K9 unit was launched, bolstering boots on the ground. In 2022, 10 elephants were poached, compared with 58 in 2016, and 119 suspected poachers were arrested – nearly all of whom (84%) were convicted. The ivory trade remains a major threat, with increasingly sophisticated criminals operating poaching syndicates, but elephants are not the only animals in danger. The park is not far from the capital, Lusaka, making it particularly vulnerable to poachers travelling from the city to the nearest village before walking over the Zambezi escarpment into the park to snatch pangolins and kill warthog, bush buck and porcupine for bushmeat.
In 2022, CLZ established the marine unit and a rapid deployment squad to ramp up the fight against illegal wildlife trade. In the first year of operation they recovered 1,052kg of bushmeat and identified 34 poachers’ camps between them. The two new units are also tasked with protecting the national park from other threats such as illegal fishing and gold mining. The latter peaked during the pandemic when people were searching for ways to restore lost income. However, thanks to targeted deployment of officers and community programmes raising awareness of the risk of mining without a licence the number of mining arrests fell to 32 in 2023 from 140 in 2021.
CLZ’s primary goal in setting up Kufadza was to address the gender imbalance in conservation, but women have proved to be often better at challenging poachers and miners, and resolving human-animal conflict. Siansuna says: “They are more likely to listen to you.”
Like all parks in Zambia, the Lower Zambezi is unfenced, meaning animals are free to roam into local villages, causing havoc, and Kufadza scouts help to calm angry residents and communicate the need to protect wildlife. Team leader, Rosemary Chimedza, 24, is stationed at her own village, with three scouts, Floriana Mutali, 21, Tinashe Siamiata, 23, and Mirriam Mpondamasa, 26. The women have set up camp in flimsy one-person tents at the side of the road ready to deal with any incidents. Elephants and hippos regularly raid vegetable gardens and maize stores during spring harvest, but this 10-day patrol has been free of incident.
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At 4.30am the following day, just as the birds are beginning to greet the dawn, the K9 trainees gather at the CLZ base for another training session. After checking their guns, they set off in single file, eyes on the ground, looking for footprints. Suddenly a shout goes up and the group breaks into a run in pursuit of a suspect.
“Drop your gun!” screams one officer. Sand and sweat fly as two trainees struggle to overpower the man in the 38C heat. Eventually he is forced to the ground and handcuffed but continues to protest his innocence: “I was bird-watching!”
A moment later the tension is broken. “Well done guys,” says Marius van Heerden, the South African who is posing as a poacher in this training exercise. Dusting himself down he adds: “You need to warn the suspect and tell him who you are, then wait for your buddy, don’t fight him alone; poachers will fight for their lives.”
A few hundred metres away in the bush, a second group of trainee officers have apprehended another “poacher”.
“I had him by the arm but then I dropped my gun and realised if I picked it up he would escape,” says Rodah Chiawa, still breathless from the mock confrontation.
Everyone laughs with relief and heads back to camp in the mid-morning sun. Three weeks after the Guardian visited, CLZ confirms that Ngulube and Chiawa have passed the K9 selection. This year, the women will be on patrol for real – and the challenge they face is no laughing matter.
