Recovering Angola’s Lion Population

Recovering Angola’s Lion Population

Panthera have recently secured an agreement with the Angolan government to provide financial and technical support for the management in the vast (30,000 square mile) Luengue-Luiana National Park. There are few places in Africa with greater potential for lion recovery. At present lion numbers are estimated to be as low as 30 individuals, but a park of that size could potentially support thousands of individuals if it was adequately protected and if prey populations were allowed to recover. The LRF provided Panthera with a grant to help them initiate support for anti-poaching via community scouts, with a view to helping them rehabilitate an extremely depleted park. Two follow up grants were then issued.

The first to provide financial and technical support to the efforts of the wildlife authority in the park (to complement law enforcement using community scouts). Secondly, a grant to help Panthera overcome a major logistical bottleneck: the park is characterized by extremely heavy Kalahari sands making the delivery of goods challenging. We provided funds to allow for the purchase of a 4×4 truck that will enable Panthera to effectively bring in supplies to support their work with communities and the wildlife authority. In late 2021, LRF provided our largest grant to date to this project – $540,000 over two years to significantly strengthen efforts on the ground.