← Field Dispatches · African Parks, no. 2
Field dispatch · Akagera National Park, Rwanda
Rwanda's savannah refuge was emptied. Then the animals came back — and so did the visitors who now fund almost all of it.
Akagera was set aside in 1934 — Central Africa's largest protected wetland, Rwanda's last home for lions and savannah wildlife. Then came 1994. Returning refugees and their cattle settled inside the park, two-thirds of it was given over, and the wildlife was hunted down. By 2001 the last lions had been poisoned out.
The Rwandan Government invited African Parks to run Akagera in partnership with the Rwanda Development Board — a single management company, one long game: rebuild the wildlife, and let tourism pay for the protection. The fences went up around the core, the rangers went in, and not one high-value animal has been lost to poaching since.
Source: African Parks — Akagera Management Company, with the Rwanda Development Board, since 2010.One reintroduction at a time, the missing animals returned to a park that had lost them for a generation.
This is the part that matters most: Akagera doesn't run on charity. It runs on people showing up. Tourism is now the park's engine — and a tenth of the income flows straight to the surrounding communities' schools and clinics.
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Every trip you take makes the model work — the park earns almost all of what it needs from the people who come to see it.
Akagera is run by African Parks — one of 24 parks they manage across 13 countries, each with its own comeback and its own place to stay.