Project launch brief: Learning Landscapes with Community Engagement Practitioners in southern Africa

Initial project launch brief for partners, potential partners and other interested parties. This is an open invitation. Whether you're ready to get involved now or just want to stay informed as this develops, we'd welcome hearing from you.

Why are we doing this

Frontline knowledge, such as that held by Community Engagement Practitioners (CEPs) in conservation, is complex, context-specific, and too often undervalued. What's missing isn't the knowledge, it's a way for it to travel, to find its way and to shape where it lands. Current structures and financing often give it nowhere to go.

Learning Landscapes opens channels for that knowledge to move: shaping practice, the organisation, then policy and economy.

In most capacity building we see knowledge flow down as training, while frontline knowledge sits at the base with a ceiling above it. This is not because anyone wills it, but because programmatic structures and financing leave it nowhere to go.

The approach

Learning Landscapes doesn't replace any existing learning programmes or communities of practice, instead it builds on them through creating a shared, organised base where frontline knowledge is held, understood and developed as an equal body of knowledge, rather than just as points of consultation or as single outputs. This base becomes something external organisations, funders and policy spaces can recognise and draw on directly, so that what's published or advocated for carries real grounding behind it. From here, frontline workers can influence practice and build recognised career pathways that acknowledge both their practice and their learning, and carry that into organisations and policy spaces.

When frontline knowledge shapes practice, organisations, policy and economies, it is brought into conversation with the systems that organisations, funders and policy spaces already work within; in this conversation we can all build collective advocacy and change. This can also mean that those from frontline positions progress more easily into leadership positions, policy is better informed by reality, and those who are most responsible for delivering social and environmental impact become more valued and those with whom they engage (communities) see value in their engagements, thus bridging the gap between organisation and communities surrounding them and opening ways for open and wider engagements.

The programme

Initially Learning Landscapes is a three year funded programme, convened by Southern African Wildlife College and realife Learning in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area 

(GLTFCA) and then into the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA). Funded by Oak Foundation, with further resourcing in development.

Timeline

Our first step began in July 2026 where we are reaching out to two kinds of organisations: those who employ CEPs, and those who do capacity-building or hold networks across the regions. Through this period we will be finding out what learning and community engagement approaches are already in place, and how we can create this programme with others. We will then select a cluster of organisations and their CEPs to run an initial learning process beginning later in 2027, with the plan to scale to multiple clusters across the regions in coming years. This is a shared story we want to create, resource and tell across all the partner organisations. We want to co-own this approach together, as part of a movement alongside others already pushing in this direction.

Representatives of SAWC, realife, K2C and Commonland in July 2026 as part of an initial stakeholder engagement.

In early 2027, with those CEPs and their organisations, we will shape the programme and its advocacy strategy, and build further relationships. We will share what comes out and form the groundwork for future clusters and connections. Throughout this, all organisations, people and institutions learn with these processes too; everyone is both educator and learner, working together to work out where learning lands.

This builds on a previous learning process with community engagement practitioners as part of the WWF-SA Khetha programme in Greater Kruger, South Africa (2023–2024), as well as other processes convened by realife Learning across different social and environmental focus areas in the last decade (see mini change project case studies below).

The long-term vision

The long-term vision is to directly fund CEPs to co-lead this work, while they remain employed in their current roles.

Over time, this is intended to grow into CEPs working across other frontline roles they often already engage with, such as smallholder farmers, regenerative herders, local ecotourism companies, health workers, environmental monitors and many more. Together, they can collectively advocate for and inform economic policy, funding and organisational strategy across the Southern African Development Community (SADC), towards valuing these frontline workers and regenerative practices.

The CEPs involved will be resourced to be the convenors, connectors and educators across the different spaces. They are the boundary crossers who bring conservation together across divides of fencelines and exclusion.

Three examples of previous change projects, and what changed, from realife’s past learning processes: 

Water and Tradition

South African Water Caucus, 2014–16 · Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (VEJA)

Personal: The team immersed themselves in African spiritual water practices. Came to see the river as home of the ancestors, not resource.

Collective: Coined "spiritual water users" as a political category: a whole class of stakeholders previously invisible in water governance.

Organisation: Traditional healer institutions joined the South African Water Caucus. VEJA won Human Rights Commission funding to continue the work.

Policy & Economy: Case presented at South African Water Caucus–Department of Water and Sanitation dialogues (2015–16) and Human Rights Commission hearings on Vaal pollution (2018). Reframed who counts as a water user.

Twickenham Mine's Social Labour Plan

Olifants, 2017–18 · Come-Act

Personal: Learned to read, monitor and challenge a Social and Labour Plan, the legal-technical work usually left to specialists.

Collective: Shared their monitoring method with other mining-affected communities across Limpopo and Mpumalanga.

Organisation: Come-Act became a hub for mine-community accountability. Three organisations on the course formally registered as NPOs.

Policy & Economy: Joined the legal challenge against the Chamber of Mines. The communities won.

Eco-Flow Empowerment

Transforming the Fenceline, 2023–24 · A CEP at the Greater Kruger fenceline

Personal: 83% of girls in her community had no regular access to menstrual products. She designed a systems-level intervention.

Collective: Reframed the project around reusable pads. Ran a community webinar. Drew other CEPs into the conversation.

Organisation: Their employer publicly recognised the value, saying they hadn't had the capacity to build such a product alone. Frameworks reused in her university teaching.

Policy & Economy: Won best presentation prize at Workshop 2. Showcased to game reserves, NGOs and government at the end-of-course conference.