Mali Elephant Landscapes Protects the Sahel's Last Desert Elephants

Mali Elephant Landscapes (formerly the Mali Elephant Project) has worked since 2003 with communities across the 3.4-million-hectare Gourma Biosphere Reserve, home to an estimated 300-400 sub-desert elephants that make the longest elephant migration in Africa. An entirely Malian field team helped villages set local rules for forest use, pasture reserves and shared water points, and kept working through years of armed conflict in the region to prevent poaching and reduce human-elephant conflict. The landscape supports roughly 1.4 million people who depend on the same land and water the elephants need to survive.