Securing land as the long-term asset base for San communities
Land loss has been the principal driver of San marginalisation. LEAP secures and expands San land rights, and builds the economic architecture that converts that land into durable community wealth — through a convergence of indigenous rights, conservation, and sustainable livelihoods.
Land loss is the root of San marginalisation
The loss of land and natural resources stripped San communities of their only substantive capital assets, and continues to limit the impact of every other development intervention. Poverty, welfare dependency, educational exclusion, poor health and social breakdown flow directly from landlessness. Restoring or expanding San land access is therefore the foundational precondition for sustainable development — providing the asset base for livelihoods, conservation finance, and community enterprise.
That dispossession has, in turn, corresponded with a sustained loss of biodiversity and ecological integrity across the San traditional territory — driven by the expansion of commercial cattle ranching, the fortress-conservation model that excluded San from the protected areas they had managed for millennia, and the progressive narrowing of customary use rights. The dispossession of San and the depletion of the lands they held are not parallel stories. They are the same story.
Rights, conservation and sustainable livelihoods
The case for LEAP rests on a structural alignment of three agendas that, until recently, were pursued separately and sometimes against each other.
A legal and ethical claim
San communities have a legal and ethical claim to the lands from which they were progressively dispossessed. Botswana's formal initiation of ILO Convention 169 ratification in February 2026, alongside UNDRIP and the African Charter, anchors that claim in international law.
Rights as conservation
Indigenous and community-managed lands hold a disproportionate share of remaining global biodiversity. The Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework explicitly recognises Indigenous territories as a pathway to its 30% by 2030 target. The framing is no longer rights or conservation — it is rights as conservation.
Value in marginal lands
Lands marginal for conventional agriculture are not marginal for what the global economy now pays for: carbon sequestration, biodiversity credits, ecosystem services and conservation tourism — precisely the flows for which San-held lands are best suited.
Restoring San tenure to ecologically valuable lands secures the rights claim, places the most appropriate custodians on the most important conservation landscapes, and creates an asset base from which sustainable, conservation-aligned livelihoods can be generated — a political coalition broader and more durable than any of these constituencies acting alone.
Why this landscape is exceptional
- The CKGR is the flagship landscape. At circa 52,000 km², it is the second-largest game reserve in the world. Together with adjacent community-managed lands, restoration would create the largest contiguous community-stewarded conservation landscape on the continent (~140,000 km²). See the dedicated CKGR restoration programme →
- The Okavango and Panhandle landscapes are Botswana's second flagship cluster. The Wildlife Management Areas around the western Okavango Delta, home to Ju/'hoan and !Xun communities, sit beside a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Ramsar wetland — and are where some of the most active dispossession of San land is currently taking place.
- Other San landscapes carry the same logic at different scales — the Kalahari sandveld of Ghanzi and Kgalagadi Districts, the Tsodilo cultural and ecological complex, and dispersed San communities on freehold-farm landscapes.
- The transboundary conservation context strengthens the case further. Much of northern Botswana sits within KAZA, the world's largest transboundary conservation landscape, directly continuous with San communities across Namibia, Zambia and Angola.
The scale and shape of the wider land question
The CKGR has a resident population of around 350 people. The majority of Botswana's San — 60,000 to 100,000 people — live elsewhere: in 73 Remote Area Settlements, on commercial freehold farms in the Ghanzi bloc, on tribal land, in Wildlife Management Areas, and on the fringes of towns. Across this population, secure tenure of any kind is the exception rather than the rule.
Six recurring patterns of tenure insecurity
Settlements without tenure
The 73 RAD settlements are administered as service-delivery zones rather than tenure-bearing communities.
Active dispossession
Land boards allocating San-occupied plots, water sources and grazing land to others without consultation.
Freehold farm workers
A substantial, poorly documented San population lives on commercial freehold farms — particularly in Ghanzi — by tolerance of the freeholder, not by right.
Third-party-held land
Settlements built up over decades on land whose title is held by churches, NGOs or other intermediaries — D'Kar being the most prominent case.
Title without capacity
The Dqae Qare Game Farm — the one case where a San community institution holds substantial freehold title — has been effectively closed for years following governance disputes. Title secured, asset dormant.
Specific tenure anomalies
Cases produced by particular policy interventions — Mababe rendered landless by a 2018 Presidential Directive among them.
From benefits to equity
The lands at the centre of LEAP are best understood through a landscapes model of conservation — one in which San communities are not external to the ecosystems they inhabit, but the principal agents through which those ecosystems are sustained. The shift from benefit-sharing to equity participation is the central structural move of this work.
The conventional CBNRM model — a community trust receiving a share of revenues from enterprises operated by others — has delivered real value, but margins on community lands in Botswana are structurally thin. This is the structural reason CBNRM in Southern Africa has so often delivered communities only 10–30% of the value generated on their land.
Equity reverses this logic. When land and custodianship are recognised as equity rather than a leased resource, the community becomes a co-owner of the enterprise — holding governance rights, capital appreciation, and a structural share of returns that does not depend on the operator's reported margins.
A hierarchy of conservation-anchored revenue streams
High ecological integrity, low conventional productivity, deep indigenous custodianship. Conservation-aligned uses sit at the centre; complementary cultural and stewardship uses around them; other uses peripheral and conditional.
Three decisive preconditions
- Tenure that can be capitalised as equity. The realistic mechanism is a long-duration lease (50+ years) granted by the community holding institution to the joint enterprise, recognised as the equity contribution.
- Community holding institutions capable of managing equity portfolios. This is the work of the dedicated CBO Support programme → — sustained outsourced legal, financial and contracting services rather than a capacity-build-and-exit model.
- Risk-bearing arrangements appropriate to early-stage equity participation. Guaranteed minimum lease components, capital protection through the Conservation Trust Fund vehicle, and insurance arrangements where available.
A different development trajectory
The combined effect of secured land and an equity-backed livelihood economy is a fundamentally different development trajectory than the welfare-and-services model that has defined San policy for fifty years. An asset-based framework starts from the opposite direction: secure the resource base, structure community institutions as owners of the enterprises operating on it, and the welfare and service deficits become tractable rather than intractable.
Conservation-aligned funding for the long-term land base of San communities.
LEAP is Anthropos's largest single funding opportunity for conservation and climate-aligned funders — anchored by the CKGR and extending across Botswana's wider dryland conservation estate.
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