The Niassa Special Reserve (NSR) held between 23 and 24 May, in Maputo, its annual meeting of tourism operators, a meeting that was attended by the Deputy Director General of the National Administration of Conservation Areas (ANAC), Severino Khoi, and that aimed to discuss the main issues of strategic management of the Mozambican conservation area with larger population of some species, such as the cases of the wild dog (mabeco), the elephant and the lion.
Severino Khoi, Deputy Director General of the National Administration of Conservation Areas (ANAC)
In his speech, the Deputy Director General of ANAC mentioned the importance of more and more managers of conservation areas to focus on innovative mechanisms for effective responses to conservation challenges and for achieving conservation levels desirable.
He also emphasized that at a time when the world has just celebrated the World Biodiversity Day, it is necessary to increasingly involve people in the issues of co-habitation between populations and wildlife, and NSR has the particularity of living inside more than 60,000 people.
NSR brings together an ecosystem with unique landscapes and ecological conditions with strong potential for hunting and contemplative tourism activities that motivated the segmentation of the area into 17 units or concessions for the development of tourism of which 15 are currently occupied by tourism operators through contracts signed and others in the course of adjudication by the entity that protects the conservation areas.
Thus, and in order to ensure better coordination and guidance of NSR’s tourism operators, this meeting is held annually between the NSR Administration and all NSR’s tourism operators, where all the issues related to the development of tourism activities as well as protection, monitoring and local development in NSR are addressed.
The activities were globally marked by the balance of the 2023 tourist season and evaluation of the level of implementation of the action points agreed at the last meeting of the operators (in 2023), as well as by the update and inform the operators on the achievements of NSR, the Management Plan, the guidelines for best hunting practices of NSR, and finally by the listening of the challenges and perspectives of NSR’s tourism operators for the present season 2023/2024, in order to define action points for improving the management of NSR.
In addition to the ANAC, the Administration and NSR tour operators, this meeting was attended by the management partner of the area, WCS, representatives of the provincial governments of Niassa and Cabo Delgado, as well as some project implementation partners of the largest conservation area in Mozambique, namely USAID, BIOFUND and the Asscociation of Mozambique Hunting Safari Operators (AMOS).