As Escudilla continues to explore new project opportunities, our current focus is on Botswana.

Botswana Community and Conservation Initiative and the Botswana Project Finance for Permanence

The Botswana Community and Conservation Initiative (BCCI) is committed to honouring the Traditional Authorities of Botswana and integrating their governance and knowledge with conservation science. Our vision is to facilitate regional conservation and rural community development by supporting sustainable land-use practices. Our initiative aims to assist communities in implementing practices that not only promote conservation but also create economic opportunities, preserve wildlife habitats and movement corridors, and enhance resilience to climate change.

The overarching goal of the BCCI is to enhance land use, climate resilience, and rural livelihoods while establishing a Project Finance for Permanence (PFP) with private sector partners. We work with Traditional Authorities, government entities, and businesses to improve natural resource decisions and support sustainable livelihoods through wildlife-compatible economic activities.

The PFP applies a proven global model: governments, communities, NGOs, and funders commit the full cost of a long-term conservation vision in a single closing agreement, so implementation begins fully resourced. The Botswana programme is built around four outcomes — biodiversity conservation, community empowerment, climate resilience, and sustainable finance mechanisms — and is anchored by a Conservation and Community Development Plan (CCDP) co-designed with traditional leaders, communities, district authorities, and the Government of Botswana.

Beginning in 2024, the PFP has been accelerated by Enduring Earth, the global partnership of The Nature Conservancy, The Pew Charitable Trusts, World Wildlife Fund, and ZOMA Lab, which has supported the feasibility and design phases in Botswana. Pew has played the lead Enduring Earth role on the Botswana programme, providing strategic, technical, and financial design support throughout. All parties are hopeful this process may move into full implementation in early 2027.

The Kalahari San Transfrontier Trail and Wildlife Corridor Initiative

Escudilla is providing assistance to this initiative, which is being developed in cooperation with the Wisdom Academy — a Nanofasa-led platform for San cultural revitalisation — and in partnership with the three regional San Community Monitoring Partners: the Khweedom Council, the First People of the Kalahari, and the Kuru Family of Organisations. It is designed and implemented under Free, Prior and Informed Consent protocols, with co-management arrangements that recognise San communities not as beneficiaries of conservation but as its rightful stewards and primary economic partners. The Kalahari San Transfrontier Trail and Wildlife Corridor Initiative is working across the Ghanzi, Kgalagadi, and Central districts to link Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the Makgadikgadi and Nxai Pans, and onward to Chobe — over 1,000 kilometres of historic San travel routes, sip-wells, and wildlife dispersal corridors that together form one of southern Africa's most significant cultural and ecological landscapes. The initiative is grounded in a simple proposition: the same routes that sustained San people across the Kalahari for millennia are the routes wildlife still need to move, and the knowledge held by San elders is indispensable to restoring connectivity in a changing climate.

The initiative works directly with the San community members across 14 distinct groups, speaking languages from three different families. Its programme is built around five interlocking components: participatory mapping and documentation of ancient water points, travel routes, and cultural sites; a San Guardian programme training community members to monitor wildlife, manage water points, and steward corridors; a network of Wisdom Centres that anchor language and knowledge transmission alongside cultural tourism; the "Route of Discovery" community-owned tourism brand; and the legal and institutional work to secure community rights, co-management agreements, and Community Conserved Area status across the corridor.

The Fauna Conservation Trust of Ngamiland

Escudilla is also providing capacity building assistance to the Fauna Conservation Trust of Ngamiland (FCTN), which is the indigenous institution through which the Batawana people exercise stewardship of Ngamiland — the historic Batawana fiefdom encompassing the present-day Okavango, North West, Chobe, and Boteti landscapes at the heart of the KAZA Transfrontier Conservation Area. Established in its modern form in October 2022 by His Majesty King Tawana II, who serves as Founder and Principal Trustee, the Trust is a deliberate revival of the Fauna Conservation Society of Ngamiland — the body the Batawana created in 1961 to manage what became the Moremi Game Reserve, making the Batawana the first native African tribe to formally structure its own conservation institution.

FCTN's mandate is to convene, broker partnerships, and mobilise finance for the long-term ecological health of the Okavango Delta and the well-being of the people of Ngamiland so that communities themselves remain the decision-makers over their own land, water, and wildlife. The Trust desires to expand its work to span CBNRM governance reform, freshwater stewardship in the Okavango basin, eco-ranger and community monitoring systems, and the development of Indigenous-led conservation finance pathways for Ngamiland.