We believe that wild landscapes are more valuable with people in them.
We help local and indigenous peoples leverage their traditional knowledge into meaningful modern livelihoods that achieve landscape-scale biodiversity conservation, inclusively.
Where We Work
Tanate Sustainable Development is a registered nonprofit charity organization in Botswana.
We work in the heart of southern Africa’s Kalahari ecosystem, the largest, least-disturbed landscape remaining on the African continent south of the Sahara.
Tanate focuses its energy on the vast lands of free-ranging wildlife and scattered villages of the first peoples, stretching from the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
Our mission is to protect this precious landscape by funding and managing wildlife conservation, ecotourism development, land management, and community development projects in the Kgalagadi Region, with emphasis on the KD2 Wildlife Management Area, where our base of operations is located near the community of Zutshwa.
What nature was like in the beginning and a reminder of what nature meant us to be
We approach the Kalahari as an underappreciated treasure to global humanity. Arguably, this is the essential landscape of human origins. Subsequently, at Tanate, we believe that the Kalahari environment is immeasurably more interesting because of the first peoples who inhabit it. The etymology of Tanate is the word //Xanate in the !Xo language, meaning sipwell, that is, those scattered locations across the great Kalahari thirstland where traditional peoples extracted life-giving water directly from the sands by means of suction through a straw.
As humanity faces dual biodiversity and cultural diversity crises, Tanate’s efforts focus as much on traditional knowledge preservation as they do habitat and wildlife conservation. Our projects leverage traditional ecological knowledge and ancient skills to enhance landscape-scale wilderness conservation and human prosperity synergistically. We firmly believe that human knowledge hard-earned over millennia is of great import to humanity’s modern challenges, and we strive to harness that knowledge, practically.
Proudly sponsored by the Comanis Foundation
Proudly sponsored by the Comanis Foundation
