WildMap
Guardians
Tebogo Monnaaphutego grew up in the wildest region of the Okavango Delta, amongst baobab trees that were sacred, essential members of the community, culture and landscape.
After serving as a safari camp manager for years, Tebogo began to notice that elephant overfeeding was decimating baobabs across the Delta—and that current efforts to deter it were causing elephant injuries and death.
Using the indigenous learning of his childhood, Tebogo spent years developing and testing an all-organic paste that could successfully protect both the baobabs and elephants at the same time.
As he began to try to paste as many of the disappearing baobabs as possible, Tebogo shared his insights and work with community elders, local leaders, school directors and friends and family.
Each had a personal desire to protect the baobab—and a way they could contribute.
He started working directly with students and teachers in the village schools, teaching them how to make the paste and taking them for wilderness experiences to learn how to apply it.
These efforts began to reach more baobabs in more locations— but also created an ongoing passion and excitement in everyone involved to look for ways that they could make a difference in conservation directly in their own environment.
Student and teacher-led ideas, enthusiasm and projects began to emerge and grow.
Now Tebogo's process, learning and experience is able to be hosted at WildMap Camp, a conservation camp experience he's establishing on his ancestral island. This will not only be a place where he can host young people and supporters to experience WildMap's work personally but also be a space from which he can document and share the stories, results and example his work represents in a variety of multimedia ways.
WildMap is more than just a singular conservation solution, program or approach.
It's an embodied realization of indigenous heritage in relationship with the land and its resilient wildness, in a form that can organically grow and spread to protect the baobab in communities not only across Botswana but across Africa.
He's also the only native Botswanan operator of an ecotourism camp like the one he's currently establishing on his ancestral land.