WACN Kainji Lake National Park Project

On the 27th of October 2023, WACN signed a 31 year MOU with the Nigeria National Park Service to co-manage the Kainji Lake National Park in northwestern Nigeria.

With this relationship, WACN will be supporting the National Park Service and by extension the Federal Government of Nigeria to adequately protect, restore, and secure the Kainji Lake National Park over time.

In recent years, Kainji has been undermined by significant security challenges in addition to decades of underfunding and other associated shortcomings. The security challenges in particular are the first hurdles for WACN. We intend to start gaining significant control of the security crisis at Kainji within the next few years with support from our partners and other stakeholders. Part of our security strategy is that we plan to ramp up adequate equipping and training of rangers, as well as utilising technology.

WACN intends to carry out an inventory and monitoring of the current fauna situation of the Kainji Lake National Park with a view to restoring locally extinct populations as well as boosting populations very close to extinction. We also want to intensify anti-poaching activities across every inch of the park in order to suppress illegal human activities affecting the park. Our target is that by 2040, big carnivore and ungulate populations should have generally doubled, with increased frequency of encounters. We will measure and confirm these increments periodically by undertaking censuses on the wildlife population. 

As part of the WACN Kainji Lake National Park Project, we are also committed to supporting communities surrounding the park, socioeconomically. We aim to create increased economic activities for the surrounding communities, assist them with access to potable water, healthcare, education, internet, among others.

WACN’s plans for Kainji are ambitious – among our ambitions is to work with potential stakeholders in a mutually beneficial way to create or recreate viable wildlife corridors in order to give more space to Kainji’s wildlife populations and consequently improve gene flow which in turn helps to sustain healthy wildlife populations.

In the end, WACN wants to have achieved a Kainji Lake National Park where people from all over the world desire to visit in good numbers to see incredible West African wildlife. By then, we hope to have achieved a Kainji Lake ecosystem that is teeming with populations of indigenous wildlife either currently present or restored – lion, leopard, buffalo, elephant, black rhinoceros, western giant eland, Nigerian giraffe, roan antelope, cheetah, hippopotamus, kob, ostrich, and a host of other impressive species.

Support the WACN Kainji Lake National Park Project today!!!