COMACO National Conservation Compliance Assessment

Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO) is a Zambia-based nonprofit that also maintains It’s Wild, a for-profit agricultural business.  COMACO’s focus is conservation, which it pursues through teaching farmers and farmer cooperatives sustainable agriculture, and then providing stable markets for those farmers to sell their products.

In order for COMACO to provide prices which reflect the impact farming practices have on the environment, it’s necessary to assess farmers and their communities on their conservation efforts.  This is done through the National Conservation Compliance Assessment.

As the data analyst for COMACO, I was tasked with collecting data from partner governmental organizations and NGOs in the areas of deforestation, poaching, and detrimental farming practices, and to develop a system to assess districts and chiefdoms on their conservation efforts.  I personally visited the Ministries of Forestry, Wildlife, and Agriculture to collect and parse their individual data.  The task took me the better part of 3 months, and involved over 350 separate data points per district.

The result was the COMACO Conservation Assessment Reports.  These reports outline the process for assessment, which included the number of elephants which had been killed in each district, the number of snares and guns which had been surrendered, and whether districts had developed and approved conservation plans.

Partnerships