New long-term transformative learning partnership with Southern African Wildlife College

We’re excited to announce our new partnership with the Southern African Wildlife College (SAWC), a long-standing centre of learning rooted in some of the most complex conservation landscapes in the region. For nearly three decades, SAWC has supported rangers, conservation practitioners and natural resource managers to navigate the realities of protecting land, wildlife and livelihoods under immense pressure, from human–wildlife conflict to extractive practices and rapidly shifting social and ecological conditions. Their work is practical, place-based and deeply connected to the people who live and work in these landscapes.

We first collaborated between 2023 and 2024 through our Transforming the Fenceline course. Since then, we have kept the conversation going, taking time to understand each other’s practices, values and ways of working. This partnership builds on that careful relationship-building, with shared work planned over the coming years.

Together, we are committed to strengthening learning that serves people working at the sharp end of conservation, including practitioners, communities, organisations and institutions grappling with real trade-offs and hard choices. This partnership is not about competing programmes or institutional ownership, but about learning approaches that are shared openly and built through collaboration in resourced relationships. By bringing SAWC’s deep field experience into dialogue with realife Learning’s Learning Landscapes approach, we aim to contribute to forms of conservation practice that are collaborative, accountable and capable of holding complexity across organisations, across landscapes and across the boundaries that too often fragment conservation and those of us involved in it and impacted by it.

Ludwig and Jane walking into the SAWC Campus during one of our partnership forming visits.