Building safeguards from the ground up: our work with TNC Zambia

TNC Zambia's work spans one of Africa's most ecologically diverse landscapes, where interconnected systems, from woodlands to wetlands, sustain rich biodiversity and critical wildlife movements. A vast mega-landscape of approximately 10 million hectares encompassing the Greater Kafue Ecosystem and the West Lunga Complex, this region covers National Parks, Game Management Areas, and community conservation areas and is home to extraordinary wildlife and plant biodiversity.

At the centre of it all are the communities whose lives, livelihoods, and rights are bound up with the land around them. For TNC Zambia, that reality isn't peripheral to their conservation mission. It is the mission. A core priority is ensuring that every project is developed through a rights-based approach, with a commitment to inclusive and equitable processes and outcomes for communities and stakeholders at every stage.

We have been proud to support that mission. Over the past year, TLLG has been working with TNC Zambia to conduct an environmental, social, and human rights risk assessment, and to develop an Environmental and Social Action Plan (ESAP) for their country programme. Running through every stage of this work has been a focus on something that often gets overlooked in safeguarding processes: capacity development. Because a safeguard framework is only as strong as the team behind it.

TNC's programme in Zambia is delivered through a network of partnerships with conservation organisations, government bodies, community groups, and private sector actors across the landscape. That partnership-driven approach is one of TNC's greatest strengths. It also meant that our standard ESAP methodology needed to be adapted to ensure the resulting ESAP was relevant to all parties. We worked with the TNC Zambia team to develop a framework and action plan that genuinely reflected the Kafue - West Lunga context: how the programme operates, who the partners are, and what is realistically achievable.

In practice, this involved two closely connected workstreams. First, we conducted an environmental, social, and human rights risk assessment alongside targeted training for TNC staff in the landscape, building the team's understanding of environmental, social and human rights risks as we went. Second, we facilitated a participatory process, culminating in a workshop with TNC, to  co-develop the ESAP with the team directly, ensuring that the framework reflected their own knowledge, priorities, and ways of working.

The result is an ESAP framework grounded in real-world insights and practical application. By aligning it with the team's current capacities and operating context, it can be genuinely integrated into day-to-day operations rather than sitting on a shelf as a compliance document. That integration is what will strengthen both implementation and long-term impact.

This is the kind of safeguarding we believe in: built collaboratively, embedded practically, and designed to grow with the people and programmes it supports.

Photo: TNC facilitators carrying out a consultation with a women’s group in Mulobezi GMA (Western Province, Zambia)

Client: The Nature Conservancy (TNC) Zambia

Location: Mulobezi Game Management Area (GMA), south-western Kafue landscape, adjacent to Kafue National Park

Period: July 2025 - April 2026