NYUNGWE NATIONAL PARK, Rwanda — It’s a cool morning in the montane rainforest of western Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park. Sunbeams stream down from the canopy, glowing in the mist. Birdsong pierces the still air. Jacques Habimana, a baby-faced 23-year-old trail guide, stops abruptly, pressing a finger to his lips. He points toward the treetops.

A troop of a dozen or so blue monkeys rustles in the leaves, jumping from branch to branch and peering down with eerie orange eyes ringed with gray fur. They skitter back into the shadows. A few meters down, the trail opens into a panoramic view of the hills beyond — dark, undulating waves that roll into the horizon.

To walk through Nyungwe’s emerald tangles is to be bathe in nature’s quiet majesty. One of the largest montane rainforests in Africa, its treetops host eastern chimpanzees, colobus monkeys, and 11 other primate species. Two hundred different kinds of orchids grow here, upon which one of 300 varieties of butterfly might land. A bird-watcher’s paradise, 30 of its 350 or so avian species are only found here in East Africa’s Albertine Rift. In 2023, the 1,019-square-kilometer (393-square-mile) park was bestowed with World Heritage status by UNESCO.

By any measure, it is a special place.

Habimana’s shirtsleeve displays a circular patch with two letters in bold embroidering: an A and a P. It’s the logo of African Parks, Nyungwe’s new warden. In 2020, the South Africa-based conservation NGO took control of the park, signing a 20-year deal with the Rwandan government to apply its revenue-focused model and management expertise to Nyungwe’s development. This public-private partnership model is becoming increasingly common in protected areas across the continent — and African Parks is its pioneer.

Since its origin as the brainchild of a Dutch industrialist 25 years ago, African Parks has grown into one of the most powerful conservation organizations in Africa. With a portfolio of 24 protected areas in 13 countries, from Benin to Zimbabwe, it commands a standing force of more than 2,000 wildlife rangers and an annual budget of $175 million. On its board sit former heads of state, business titans and European royalty.

All at once a custodian of nature, a biodiversity-focused consultancy and a law enforcement operation, African Parks is transforming conservation here in Rwanda and beyond. It’s already molded Akagera National Park, another protected area in the country’s eastern savannas, into a thriving international tourist attraction. President Paul Kagame’s government hopes it can do the same for Nyungwe.

If all goes well, this glittering green prize will be a beacon in the fast-expanding empire of African Parks.

The business of conservation

On a remote hilltop inside the forest, Nyungwe’s top brass sit around a conference table in a run-down concrete building. This is the park’s old headquarters; a new, modern facility built by African Parks is still a few months away from completion. As heavy rain patters outside, Kambojo Ildephonse, the park’s then-commercial development manager (he has since left the position), briefs his visitors on what’s in store.

“The park has always been a liability for the government before now. One of the targets for the new management is transforming it into a profit-making asset. The plans are there, the vision is there,” he says.

The African Parks model has three “pillars.” One is the protection of biodiversity, the second is development for communities living near its parks, and the last is revenue generation. Ildephonse leads with the latter.

“What African Parks does is partner with governments for sustainable, effective, long-term management to solve the biggest challenges that protected areas face. And those are mainly having adequate financing for park management, because it’s expensive,” he says.

Crucially, African Parks brings decades of experience with marketing and the tourism industry to the table. That a protected area can be something other than a financial burden — even an asset — is a core part of its pitch. For governments looking to diversify their economies and attract foreign capital, it can be a very appealing one.

Still, most of the parks under its management run in the red. They’re often remote and hard to reach, or are located in countries dealing with political instability and conflict, with limited appeal for most casual travelers.

Donors in the U.S. and Europe fill much of the gap. Two of its parks have begun to earn money from carbon credit sales, and the group is running a pilot project in four others to generate what it calls “verifiable nature units” — a kind of biodiversity credit meant to be purchased by corporations or other entities looking to offset their ecological impacts.

But here in Rwanda, the group’s vision of tourism as the driver of protected area sustainability has found its greatest success.

“This park is managed now as a business of conservation,” Ildephonse says.

Birth of a giant

African Parks made its entry into Rwanda in 2010, when it signed an agreement to manage Akagera, a 1,122-km2 (433-mi2) park on the other side of the country. Akagera’s outer flank had been degraded by displaced people looking for farmland after Rwanda’s civil war and genocide in the 1990s, and Kagame’s government was looking for a partner to help get it back into shape. With support from the EU, African Parks got the nod.

It was a big moment for the organization, which had just withdrawn from two parks in Ethiopia after becoming embroiled in conflict with communities there. And it came during a growth spurt — that same year, it signed agreements to manage Zakouma National Park, a 3,000-km2 (1,160-mi2) desert landscape in Chad, and Odzala-Kokoua National Park, a sprawling 13,500-km2 (5,210-mi2) rainforest in the Republic of Congo. The deals came amid a wider trend of partnerships between governments and private actors to manage services and public assets across Africa.

“[We] bring together the respective strengths of the public and private sector,” says Jean Labuschagne, African Parks’ conservation director, over a video call from its headquarters in Johannesburg.

A private sector, bottom-line mentality is hard-coded into African Parks’ DNA. The organization was founded by Paul van Vlissingen, a Dutch entrepreneur whose company, SHV Holdings, got its start in the energy sector before moving into shipping, supermarkets and financial services. The story goes that the idea for African Parks arose at a state dinner in the Netherlands for Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first post-apartheid president. During the meal, Vlissingen, a conservationist and hunter, lamented the poor state of protected areas on the continent.

Mandela reportedly urged Vlissingen to step up and put his fortune to work on the problem.

Vlissingen took up Mandela’s challenge, founding African Parks in 2000. After a slow start, the group won a contract to manage Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2005. Garamba, one of the continent’s oldest protected areas, was a troubled one at that time, plagued by elephant poaching and incursions by rebel groups.

Vlissingen died in 2006, passing leadership of the organization into the hands of one of his deputies, Peter Fearnhead, a former Deloitte consultant who had previously been commercial development manager at the agency that supervises South Africa’s national parks. Twenty years on, Fearnhead remains CEO, and under his guidance African Parks has had a meteoric rise in the world of conservation.

The public-private partnership model the group is known for is now becoming increasingly common in Africa. This year, the NGO Sahara Conservation inked a deal with the Chadian government to run an 80,000-km2 (30,900-mi2) nature reserve. In the DRC, Upemba National Park is managed by Forgotten Parks, while WWF has co-management responsibilities at Salonga National Park. The private foundation of U.S. philanthropist Gregory C. Carr plays a similar role at Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park.

But what sets African Parks apart is the scale of its operations. No organization approaches the breadth of its portfolio, responsibilities or size. More than 200,000 km2 (77,200 mi2) on the continent are under its watch — more than twice the landmass of Austria. In each of the 24 protected areas it manages, it maintains a force of wildlife rangers, including the 93 deployed here in Nyungwe. The group’s roster of donors has included the EU, the U.S. State Department and, before it was dissolved this year, USAID. The foundations of Walmart founder Rob Walton and Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss have each pledged upward of $100 million to the organization in recent years.

In African Parks’ relatively short lifespan, it has amassed influential supporters across the world, capable of opening doors for it throughout the continent. And open those doors have. On its way through them, African Parks has taken the reins of protected areas as varied as the marine Bazaruto Archipelago National Park in Mozambique, Angola’s arid Iona National Park, and earlier this year, the wetlands of Gambella National Park in Ethiopia.

“Our role is to unlock as much value and benefit from ensuring that they are sustainably managed,” Labuschagne says.

In addition to a deep roster of donors, African Parks offers its proprietary conservation model to host governments, complete with glossy marketing materials, expertise in translocating wildlife, and an emphasis on fundraising. It’s a persuasive package for states that would rather spend their time and energy on priorities other than protecting nature.

Ideally, the model pays off for governments by reducing the financial pressures of conservation, and for nature in the form of rehabilitated landscapes and healthy wildlife. African Parks regularly translocates and reintroduces species into the protected areas it manages — for example, through its flagship “rhino rewild” program — and deploys its rangers to enforce antipoaching laws. Every two years, it carries out a census or survey to measure wildlife population trends, and it has programs to address clashes between wildlife and the people who live nearby.

African Parks’s growth hasn’t come without troubles. In early October, the government of Chad, where the organization manages two large protected areas, issued a decision to unilaterally terminate its contracts. In a scathing letter obtained by the outlet Africa Intelligence, Chad’s environment minister, Hassan Bakhit Djamous, accused African Parks of a “lack of transparency” in financial management and prioritizing tourism over conservation.

The decision was short-lived, though. Less than two weeks later it was rescinded, after the European Union’s representative in Chad reportedly sent a letter to President Idris Déby threatening to suspend 20 million euros ($23 million) in conservation aid funding if the partnership with African Parks was cancelled — a reminder of the kind of support the organization has up its sleeve from its powerful funders.

With that support in hand, the group has set its sights on ambitions far beyond what it’s achieved so far. Last year in New York, it announced a goal of raising $1 billion to expand its portfolio to 30 protected areas in Africa by 2030. A close look at its “161 Strategy” — named for the 161 conservation “anchor areas” African Parks has identified across the continent — hints at aspirations that may be grander still.

“We see conservation as a 100-, 200-, 300-year game, if not longer,” Labuschagne says. “That’s why the essential principle to what we do is it has to be long-term. You can’t just come in for five years and think you’re going to have meaningful impact.”

Green growth

For Nyungwe’s Rwandan managers, the initial focus is a bit more short-term. Operations at the park are supervised by a seven-person board that’s split between African Parks appointees and representatives of the Rwandan government and tourism industry. That board has set a goal for Nyungwe to cover 80% of its expenses by 2028.

It’s an ambitious target, but not unachievable. Akagera attracted 56,000 visitors in 2024, 45% of them Rwandan, which financed 97% of its operating costs — a rarity for protected areas in Africa, which are more often money sinks that depend heavily on foreign donors to stay afloat. According to figures shared by African Parks in its 2024 annual report, the number of tourist visits to Nyungwe jumped by 16% between 2023 and 2024, generating nearly $2.5 million, about half of the park’s costs.

“Each protected area has a business plan, and we’ve got ecological, social and sort of financial-slash-commercial objectives that the park wants to reach,” Labuschagne says. “So Nyungwe is obviously looking at that within the Nyungwe perspective, but of course trying to decrease a reliance on donor funding over time.”

To reach their goal, Nyungwe’s managers will need to get more bodies into the forest. That means expanding the number and variety of attractions on offer. In July, a rustic new eco-lodge opened for business, along with a recently completed 2,000-meter-long (6,600-foot) zipline. The park’s famed 70-meter-high (230-ft) canopy skybridge remains one of its star attractions, and for those willing to shell out the high fees, there are daily chimpanzee treks. To accommodate bird-watchers and hiking enthusiasts, new trails and campsites are being cut into the forest.

“I think currently people are spending on average $80 on a visit [per] day, and we’d really like to get that up, through offering more activities in-park so people stay a little longer,” Labuschagne says.

An increase in traffic to Nyungwe would draw applause in Kigali and Johannesburg, but the prospect makes some conservation biologists uneasy. Tourism is straining iconic landscapes elsewhere in East Africa, and more visitors means more challenges in managing their ecological impacts. On Akagera’s main road, four-by-fours full of tourists race each other to get the best view of its elephants and lions, and the park’s breakneck growth has made even some of its administrators uneasy.

“In other parks that have experienced really high levels of tourism, it starts to impact wildlife behavior and there are also waste management and disease spread issues. So I think it’s really a concern,” says Beth Kaplin, a conservation scientist who’s been visiting Nyungwe since the mid-1990s.

Labuschagne says African Parks is aware of the potential ecological footprint of a tourism boom, and monitors all its parks for negative impacts. Some activities, like chimpanzee trekking, are limited to small groups — and priced steeply — to minimize them.

“We have really clear metrics across the social piece, across the ecological piece, and across the financial piece that we’re constantly monitoring and looking for signs of that balance not being maintained,” she says.

Whatever the trade-offs, the Rwandan government has made clear through its partnership with African Parks that it expects Nyungwe to earn its keep. The park is, as Ildephonse puts it, a state “asset,” and as such its value needs to be maximized.

This is the core of the service that African Parks has to offer a country like Rwanda — whether through its roster of donors, carbon and biodiversity credit sales, or tourism ventures, it promises to unburden governments of the costly drag of conservation and find ways for nature to pay for its own protection.

“Rwanda is really going for high-end tourism, and that’s why they love African Parks,” Kaplin says.

Pillars and gates

Inside Nyungwe’s shaded groves, annual revenue projections for the park seem both impossibly crude and completely warranted. There is no denying that the forest deserves some form of protection.

Nyungwe’s manager, Protais Niyigaba, says he fell in love with the park as a biology student during a class trip. The group woke up in their campsite covered in ants, and while his classmates were not amused, he was hooked.

“It was really an experience where, if you like it, you like it, and if you hate it, you hate it,” he says, laughing.

The park both is, and is not, in Rwandan hands. The model in place here was crafted by the senior staff of African Parks in Johannesburg, who supervise and set policy for all its parks, but Rwanda maintains final sign-off authority for planning and hiring. Niyigaba himself is a local, raised not far from Nyungwe. African Parks signs his checks, but his connection to the forest transcends his job.

“When I’m walking in the forest, there are some spots where I arrive and I’m in an experience of déjà vu,” he says in a soft voice. “So I think, maybe, once before this life I was somewhere in the universe in a similar forest. There’s a connection that brings passion and love.”

That connection is shared by many of the people who work in the park. Habimana, the trail guide, was born in Banda, a small town in a valley wedged in the park’s northern border. One of a handful of people who’ve found full-time employment in Nyungwe, he says he loves his job.

“I like guiding, it connects me with people from different nationalities and points of view, and helps me to get updated with animals and nature,” he says, picking his way nimbly down the trail.

The majority of his neighbors, however, do not have the chance to enjoy what the forest has to offer. With few exceptions, they are barred from entering it unless they pay an entrance fee. Banda has historically been a hotspot for hunters looking for forest rats and duiker inside Nyungwe. As part of its “community development” pillar, since African Parks took over the forest it has hired some of them as casual laborers or eco-guards. Others are simply warned to stay out.

“The park is teaching people to live together with animals,” Habimana says. “They are not allowed to kill or harm them, and the poaching has reduced significantly.”

Those who don’t listen are liable to encounter a tougher side of African Parks, one that tourists only see in passing.

Just down the trail, under a shaded wooden shelter, sit two stone-faced men in camouflage fatigues, AK-47s resting beside them. This is the Nyungwe detachment of African Parks’ 2,000-strong force of wildlife rangers, the largest commanded by any NGO in Africa.

This force provides security here and in all the protected areas managed by African Parks, policing their boundaries, removing snares and detaining trespassers. They represent, in its own words, “the most critical and foundational component” of its conservation work.

They have also, in recent years, given African Parks its biggest headaches.

Banner image: A L’Hoest’s monkey (Allochrocebus Ihoesti) at Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park. Image by Ashoka Mukpo/Mongabay.

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