A quiet partnership between a safari company, a trust and the government is betting that environmental education, not just policy, will save the country’s natural heritage.
On a weekday morning at Tshwaragano Primary School, the lesson is not on the chalkboard. It is under the acacia tree outside, where a dozen children crouch over a patch of earth, turning soil between their fingers as an instructor explains how the Okavango Delta, the vast inland river system that sustains life across northern Botswana; was formed, and what threatens it now.
This is not an extracurricular add-on. It is the centerpiece of a partnership that has been quietly reshaping how environmental education is delivered in this corner of southern Botswana, and on Monday, the organizations behind it gathered at the school to sign an agreement that deepens their commitment – and their funding – by a significant margin.
Wilderness, the ecotourism company best known for its high-end safari lodges across southern Africa, renewed and expanded its partnership with Botswana’s Ministry of Child Welfare and Basic Education, BIHL Trust and Mokolodi Nature Reserve on Monday, signing a new Memorandum of Understanding that extends a collaboration first established in 2018.
The renewal itself might have attracted little notice beyond Gaborone’s education circles. But the numbers tell a bigger story: BIHL Trust, the philanthropic arm of one of Botswana’s largest financial services groups, announced that its funding commitment has grown to 245,776 pula – roughly $18,500 – over the life of the new agreement, a more than threefold increase from the partnership’s original annual allocation of approximately 73,300 pula.
The additional 172,476 pula, approved by the trust’s board, is not a rounding error in a country where per-pupil public spending remains modest. It will cover expanded Eco-Club activities, additional teacher training, more camp visits and new school-based conservation projects – the hands-on experiences that the programme’s designers argue make the difference between a child who can define “biodiversity” and one who can explain why it matters to her community.
A Model Built on Complementary Strengths
The partnership’s architecture is deliberately cross-sectoral, and its organizers say that is the point. The Ministry of Child Welfare and Basic Education provides institutional backing and ensures alignment with Botswana’s national Environmental Education curriculum. Children in the Wilderness, the nonprofit programme Wilderness has run across southern Africa for more than two decades, delivers the hands-on learning curriculum. Mokolodi Nature Reserve, a 30-square-mile conservation area just south of Gaborone, serves as the outdoor classroom where much of that learning happens. And BIHL Trust provides the funding; along with something its directors say matters just as much: the participation of its employees.
“The future of conservation depends not only on the policies we put in place or the resources we protect, but on the values we instil in our young people,” said Esther Kanaimba-Senai, the board chair of BIHL Trust, speaking at the signing ceremony. “We want learners to move beyond simply understanding environmental challenges and become thinkers, problem-solvers and future custodians of Botswana’s natural heritage.”
It is a formulation that echoes a broader shift in conservation thinking across the continent; one that has moved steadily away from fortress-style protection, in which local communities are fenced off from wildlife areas, toward approaches that try to make those communities the primary stakeholders in preserving them.
Learning by Doing, Not by Rote
Children in the Wilderness does not replace Botswana’s national curriculum. Its designers are careful to emphasize that it complements it, using what they call “experiential learning” to bring environmental concepts to life in a way that textbooks, however well written, cannot.
At Tshwaragano, Eco-Club members explore climate change not as an abstraction but through the lens of drought patterns they can observe in their own backyards. They study river systems by tracing the Okavango’s flood cycles – why the water arrives when it does, what happens when it does not. They learn about sustainable agriculture by planting and tending school gardens. They examine biodiversity by cataloguing the species that live in the scrubland around Mokolodi.
Teachers at the school are trained as “Eco-Mentors,” ensuring that the learning does not stop when the camp visit ends but continues in classrooms and school communities throughout the year. The model’s designers say this continuity is essential: one-off encounters with nature, however stirring, tend to fade. Sustained engagement, they argue, changes attitudes.
Joe Matome, the caretaker managing director of Wilderness Botswana, made the case plainly at the ceremony. “Our aim is not simply to teach facts about the environment,” he said, “but to help shape the attitudes, practical skills and leadership needed to safeguard it.”
The Results, Measured in Scholarships and Futures
If the programme’s aspirations sound lofty, its organizers point to tangible outcomes as evidence that the approach works – outcomes that extend well beyond environmental literacy.
Senior Eco-Club members at Tshwaragano have earned prestigious scholarships to Legae Academy, one of Botswana’s most competitive independent schools. It is a result that the programme’s leaders cite not as a vanity metric but as proof of a deeper proposition: that environmental education, when done well, does not narrow a child’s horizons to conservation. It opens them.
“Their achievement reflects what can happen when environmental learning is connected to confidence, curiosity and wider educational opportunity,” said one programme organizer, summarizing a view that has gained traction among educators across sub-Saharan Africa – that the skills developed through hands-on conservation work, observation, critical thinking, patience, teamwork, are transferable, and powerfully so.
The numbers at a national level are modest but growing. Over the past decade, Children in the Wilderness has reached more than 2,700 children through its Eco-Clubs across Botswana. A further 320 learners are currently enrolled across nine schools. More than 2,200 children have visited camps and conservation areas, experiencing the natural environment first-hand and, organizers hope, glimpsing the careers and livelihoods it can support.
Some of the programme’s alumni have become professional guides, leading visitors through the same deltas and savannas they first encountered as children. Others have become pilots. A few have gone into conservation science. Many more, organizers acknowledge, have simply carried forward a quiet but durable sense that the natural world is worth paying attention to; a result that is harder to quantify but no less real for that.
A small school with an outsized role
Tshwaragano Primary School occupies a particular niche in the programme’s architecture: it is currently Children in the Wilderness’s sole partner school in southern Botswana, making it both a pilot site and a proof of concept. If the expanded partnership succeeds here – and the early scholarship results suggest it is – the model could be replicated in other schools across the region.
That question of scale matters. Botswana is often described, not inaccurately, as an African conservation success story: roughly 38 percent of its land is under some form of protection, and its elephant population, at around 130,000, is the largest on the continent. But those headline figures mask mounting pressures – human-wildlife conflict, habitat fragmentation, the slow creep of climate-driven drought, and a growing population that will need both jobs and a livable environment in the decades to come.
Vision 2036, Botswana’s long-term development blueprint, identifies a sustainable environment as one of its core aspirations. The agreement signed at Tshwaragano on Monday is, by its nature, a small thing; a single school, a few hundred children, a partnership among a handful of organizations. But its organizers argue that it is precisely this kind of small, sustained, ground-level investment that large national ambitions ultimately rest on.
“If we want responsible environmental behaviour tomorrow, we must build awareness, skills and values today,” Kanaimba-Senai said. It is a statement that could serve as an epitaph for any number of abandoned conservation plans – or as the operating principle of one that, eight years in, appears to be working.
At Tshwaragano, the children under the acacia tree have finished their lesson. They brush the soil from their hands and file back into the classroom. Outside, the afternoon heat settles over Gaborone. Inside, a girl who can now explain how the Okavango Delta was formed opens her mathematics textbook, and gets back to work.