KAZA launches regenerative tourism to boost conservation and local enterprise

Five countries across Southern Africa have joined forces to reshape how tourism operates within one of the world's largest protected landscapes. The Kavango Zambezi Trans-Frontier Conservation Area—a sprawling conservation zone spanning Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe—launched a regenerative nature-based tourism initiative in late September, backed by funding from the European Union and the German Government. The program, formally called the Joint Action on Regenerative Nature-Based Tourism, was unveiled during a three-day Regional Stakeholder Roundtable in Maun, Botswana, bringing together government officials, conservation groups, financial institutions, and small business operators from across the region.

The initiative targets a specific gap in the tourism economy: the micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises that operate within and around protected areas but often lack the resources, training, and market access to thrive. The program will direct support toward women-led businesses, youth entrepreneurs, and enterprises rooted in local communities—offering capacity building, access to finance, business development services, and stronger pathways into regional tourism markets. The underlying premise is straightforward: if tourism is going to happen in these landscapes anyway, the benefits should flow directly to the people living there and the conservation work that protects the land itself.

KAZA TFCA represents the world's largest terrestrial transfrontier conservation landscape, a designation that carries both opportunity and complexity. The five-country footprint means coordination across borders, multiple regulatory environments, and the need to align incentives across governments with different priorities. Yet it also means scale—the ability to market a unified conservation and tourism experience across a region, and to create economic momentum that reaches beyond any single country's borders. Officials framed the initiative as a way to ensure tourism strengthens both ecological resilience and the communities that depend on the land.

Botswana's Minister of Environment and Tourism, represented at the launch by Acting Deputy Permanent Secretary Charles Kabo Mojalemotho, emphasized that regenerative tourism must benefit nature and the people who rely on it. The KAZA Secretariat's Executive Director, Dr Nyambe Nyambe, highlighted the strategic focus on women-led, youth-led, and community-based enterprises as a direct investment in the region's long-term stability. Simone Goertz, Head of Economic and Development Cooperation at Germany's embassy in Botswana, positioned the initiative within a broader partnership extending beyond tourism into transboundary resource management, biodiversity conservation, and climate resilience.

The framing of "regenerative" rather than merely "sustainable" signals a deliberate shift in philosophy. Sustainability often means maintaining existing systems; regeneration means actively restoring ecological and social systems. Catalin Gherman, Head of Partnerships at the EU Delegation to Botswana and SADC, noted that global tourism markets are increasingly rewarding businesses that demonstrate positive environmental and social impacts—a market signal that aligns commercial incentive with conservation outcome. The challenge, he suggested, lies in translating that market demand into support for the smallest operators, those most embedded in local communities but least equipped to navigate complex certification or reporting requirements.

The Regional Stakeholder Roundtable brought together representatives from all five KAZA partner states, the SADC Secretariat, conservation organizations, private-sector players, and the MSMEs themselves. Their task over the three days was to validate findings from a tourism value-chain analysis and to jointly determine implementation priorities for the program. This collaborative design—rather than a top-down rollout—reflects an understanding that regenerative tourism cannot be imposed; it must be built with the people who will operate within it.

The initiative is implemented by GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) in partnership with the KAZA and SADC secretariats, with funding from Germany and the European Union. It is part of a larger multi-partner agreement that extends similar regenerative tourism support to Colombia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, suggesting a global shift toward this model. For the KAZA region, the next phase involves translating stakeholder input into concrete programs—determining which enterprises receive support first, what training looks like, how finance flows, and how success gets measured. The real test will come when the first cohort of women entrepreneurs or youth-led ventures begins accessing those resources and navigating the market integration that the program promises.