Hammerskjoeld Simwinga

Hammerskjoeld Simwinga (born Nov. 17, 1964, Isoka, Zambia) is a Zambian environmentalist who helped fight wildlife poaching in Zambia by creating new economic opportunities in poverty-stricken villages.

Simwinga was named for Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations secretary-general who died in a plane crash in Zambia in 1961. Simwinga’s father was a medical aide who worked in various regions of Zambia, and the younger Simwinga became fluent in seven African languages. After earning agriculture certificates from the Zambia College of Agriculture and the City and Guilds London Institute (Lusaka, Zambia), he worked as a farm manager.

(Read E.O. Wilson’s Britannica essay on mass extinction.)

Concerned about wildlife poaching, Simwinga joined the North Luangwa Conservation Project in 1994. The organization had been founded in 1986 by Mark Owens and Delia Owens, American zoologists who had gone to the region to study lions but instead turned their attention to the rampant poaching of elephants in North Luangwa National Park. With funding from a German zoological society, they set up antipoaching patrols and began community development projects to give the villagers an alternative to poaching for survival. Simwinga became the main force behind the agricultural development work. He founded “wildlife clubs”—cooperatives that provided business loans and technical assistance to farmers.

The project was so successful that in 1996 corrupt government officials who benefited from the poaching attempted to close it down. The Owenses, away at the time, were advised not to return; the funding stopped, and it fell to Simwinga to keep the work going. He subsequently established a new organization, the North Luangwa Wildlife Conservation and Community Development Programme, funded by a British charity called Harvest Hope. With additional money from the Owens Foundation, he established beekeeping and fish-farming projects, among other new endeavours.

By the early 21st century, poaching in the North Luangwa valley had been largely stopped, and wildlife was returning to the area. Moreover, the villagers subsisted on agriculture, from which they earned far more than they had from poaching. For his work, Simwinga was in 2007 awarded the Goldman Prize—sometimes called the environmental Nobel Prize.