Zambezi Impact Foundation
The Zambezi Impact Foundation is a US 501(c)(3) public charity founded in 2021. It exists to do one thing well: put proven technology in the hands of the people protecting wildlife in the Zambezi region of southern Africa, and keep it running.
Conservation there is done by small teams over enormous areas. Their budgets go to rangers, vehicles, fuel and fences. What rarely gets funded is the layer that lets a team of twenty watch a landscape the size of a small country: acoustic sensors that hear a gunshot, camera traps that recognize a vehicle where none should be, trackers that show a herd moving toward a village before it arrives, and the long-range networks that carry all of it to a control room where no phone signal reaches.
The Foundation raises money from individual monthly donors, buys the units, and places them with field partners who operate them. Its partner to date is Wild Is Life in Zimbabwe.
Bastiaan den Braber is the Founder and Executive Director of the Zambezi Impact Foundation. He has travelled Africa for more than twenty years, qualified as a FGASA Level 1 field guide in 2009, and spent his career in strategy consulting and technology across five continents before turning to wildlife conservation. He founded the Foundation in 2021 to fund and place conservation technology with field partners in the Zambezi region. He photographs the wildlife he encounters in the field.
Programs
Wild Is Life
Wild Is Life in Zimbabwe: elephant rescue, rehabilitation and rewilding, and the protection of the landscapes the animals return to. The Foundation has raised about $20,000 in support of their work and introduced them to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which supplied ten acoustic recording units.