Thank You Joyce and thank you everyone for being here to listen to all the work that we're doing to conserve these incredible species around the world it's real honor to be here and I'm excited to tell you how the capacity building of WCN has literally empowered cheetah conservation but Savannah to do the work that we do in the western Kalahari to conserve cheetahs to begin with let's see where did we start you know I as she stories you know sort of briefly said I was lucky to grow up in some wild places and I fell in love with wildernesses as a very young age I knew I wanted to be a wildlife conservationist from as long as I could remember and I wanted to save endangered species I wasn't exactly sure which species it would be and I thought time will tell let's see and I got the opportunity to work in oh there's my my starting slide and when I got the opportunity to go to Botswana and work in a reserve called Mokolodi Nature Reserve and what SWANA has one of the largest cheetah popular populations left in the world today I was really really excited to go there one of I was doing biodiversity surveys in the reserve I was also running the wildlife rehabilitation center and one of my Jobs was looking after these two beautiful cats Duma and the Tutsi which I didn't name them but it means cheetah in Swahili and cheetah in Savannah I fell in love with them you know every day I would go in they would come up to me they would be happy to see me because I had food for them and they would purr they would look into my eyes and I got really really inspired by these cats and I started to think well you know these are wonderful ambassador cats how can we start to partner with cheetah groups that are working throughout Botswana to conserve these beautiful animals and so I looked around to see where those partnerships could possibly be and I was incredibly surprised to learn that there was nothing going on for cheetah conservation in Botswana Botswana was in the center of the of the cheetahs range in southern Africa and yet we knew very little about how many cheetahs we heard their status and distribution across the country and the threats to their populations and I would go in every day and look at them and they would look into my eyes as if they were saying you have to do something so I thought well here's my opportunity to to make an impact in the world and I started up a cheetah conservation program in in 2003 and she just really do need our help in 1900 we had about a hundred thousand cheetahs and their range has contracted significantly their numbers have gone down alarmingly due to habitat loss declining prey populations increasing human wildlife conflict which is the biggest challenge for teachers today and the illegal trade as well declined to that in 2016 you know we have just less than 7,000 cheetahs so it's a really concerning decline but so Ana has a huge responsibility to play in this between Botswana and Namibia we have 55 percent of the world's cheetahs left today so it really is a core area for cheaters it's the heartland of cheetahs in southern Africa you can see in 1900 their range covered North Africa the Arabian peninsular down into India and due to the threats that I've mentioned they've now decreased into just these countries in the red areas that we see today and the role that Botswana can play in cheetah conservation as a whole is something that we take very seriously most of the Cheetahs in Botswana we learned are found in the Kalahari region the Western Kalahari in the southern Kalahari so we knew that that's where we had to do our work with these are huge expansive landscapes incredibly beautiful we still have free roaming populations of wildlife really good sheet of populations wild dog populations other carnivores it really is an incredible area to do conservation and we feel that she's a fantastic flagship species for this region they don't do very well in national parks protected areas because they they know they're out computed by stronger carnivores being a wide-ranging low density animal they need to we need to think of large areas of conservation you know being at the top of the food chain if we can conserve enough cheaters we know that the habitats and the other animals in which they depend can also be conserved and tilaka if we look at the human footprint index of Africa today and we can see you know the red is where there's a lot of human intervention you know interactions and things the green is where there's sort of the least human influenced areas in the landscape and we can see that this Western Kalahari area of Botswana is one of the most wild natural landscapes in Africa south of the Sahara Desert but it's all not simple we do have incredible wild areas but we also have human communities that are sharing the land with these animals and human wildlife conflict is the biggest threat to cheetahs and wild dogs and the other care carnivores sharing the land with these communities and this is the thing that we knew we had to target early on we had to reduce the retaliatory killings because farmers would often see cheetahs the fastest land animal on earth there's nothing more than a threat to their livestock and when they would see them they would run them down with dogs they would trap them they would shoot them this is what we had to change right away so we knew we had to work in the Western Kalahari this is our focal area and we were invited to set up a camp in sustainably run cattle farm in in the hansi region and they were doing all kind of sustainable sustainable techniques they heard about the work that we were doing with farming communities and they invited us to set up a camp now it's a really tough area this is our camp it's a very rustic kind of Bush camp in the middle of nowhere and I just to show you a little example of the expensiveness of where we live here's a small video which kind of demonstrates that this is our team this is our camp and we're really out there middle of nowhere and you can see that there's no there's no power lines to connect to like how are we going to have an effective camp here you know in the summertime it can get extremely hot in the wintertime at night extremely cold you know we needed simple things so that our staff could actually live in these areas we needed you know we needed power so that we could run our computers so that we could have lighting so that we could have a fridge to keep the food cool we you know we needed power so that we could have a fan to keep us cool when we're trying to do work there's a small Education Center there we wanted to invite farmers to learn about sustainable farming we wanted to invite the kids there to learn about conservation we needed power to do all of that and we were put in touch with this fantastic man called Steve gold who was instrumental in giving us our solar system at one of my first well my first ever presentation at WCN which I believe was 15 years ago I stood up this was before we had a camp in the Kalahari and at the end Steve gold stood up and he said what do you need Rebecca and I was like well we need this equipment and we need no funding for this and that I know there's so much to do you know I could work 24/7 when we need energy and I was talking about personal energy to get through the day and do as much work as we can and Steve thought I was talking about power energy and he was like right I'm gonna start this solar program I'm gonna enable these conservationists to live in these remote areas by starting up and facilitating getting donations of solar equipment and so Steve for I think for the last 15 years with his right-hand man Peter and Brandon I just think you should stand up so we could all give you a round of applause eating it up and that was the best misunderstanding that I ever had in my whole life because he's gone on to provide solar power systems for over 50 projects around the world so it's an incredible achievement and actually this system is now 10 years old and you know technology has advanced significantly the the panels are not really providing our energy needs anymore and Steve came out he had a look at everything he said you need a new system so he came back to California and he got support and donations a big THANK YOU to Catherine from simplify batteries Brandon from Outback power systems and Greg from uni rec they have provided all of the components and provided a system that's worth over 120 thousand dollars and on Friday it left in the container to Botswana it's going to provide our power systems for the next 20 years and because we live there because we're able to live there now comfortably and our team can be there we're able to run our programs we do scientific research we we count cheetahs threw track surveys through camera traps we learn more about their behaviors and their land-use needs their spatial needs through satellite collars all of this takes power we need to charge our batteries we need to have computers to download the locations so we know where the cheetahs are and we receive a lot of information about sheeted behaviors that we can give back to the farmers only 6% of their diet is actually made up of livestock they have really large home ranges so if you do really good livestock management and protect your livestock you can cheetahs will just move through your land and they'll move elsewhere and it's been really really effective to get this research done on the farmlands and so we go up we have a rapid response team because we're living right there Wilkin phone us if they're having a cheetah problem and we can go out and support them and help them to figure out how they can reduce their losses through using herding prowl enclosure designs the use of livestock guarding dogs and donkeys and breeding seasons all proven to reduce conflict we have mobile workshops where we go out to the settlements and we also bring the farmers to our Education Center to learn all of these different techniques we we are able to demonstrate we have sustainable grazing going on in the land we have breeding seasons going on livestock guarding dogs donkeys etc we can demonstrate all of these techniques we also have our livestock guarding dog program running from this area we take unwanted puppies from villages unwanted puppies from animal shelters that are due to be euthanized and we give them a second chance at life as wildlife conservationist they come to our farm they learn from our livestock guarding dogs how to be effective livestock guardians and then we place them out with farmers such as mr. TOWIE here who used to kill cheetahs and jackals they were predate on his livestock he still had problems so he called us and we gave him a livestock guarding dog his losses have reduced to zero and he's now promoting the concept to his farming community we also him bring the kids to the Education Centre and so that we can give them increased knowledge and the incredible wildlife that they live together with people don't realize that but Savannah has so many endangered species and they need to really under have a global view of what an incredible biodiversity but SWANA has so we get them excited about conservation so that they can be the next Wildlife conservationists and we have a new program now that we've started in this what we call the Wildlife Management Area and it's a corridor between the central Kalahari Game Reserve and the hollow heavy transparent air park and this Wildlife Management Area exists and people are supposed to have wildlife based economies but at the moment there's nothing but livestock farming going on and slowly due to pressure from agricultural needs they're slowly eroding this Wildlife Management Area at the edges to turn into more grazing land so they need to start generating money from wildlife initiatives so we've started working with these two villages Betty and cafe we've started off doing participatory planning workshops last year to ask them you know where have they come from where are they now where are they going what are their skills and expertise what natural resources do they have and what is their vision for the future so we can start working together to develop some alternative lively livelihood strategies beyond livestock farming and their just a brief sort of another livelihood another capacity building initiative that WCN has supported us with is putting us in touch with an organization called conservation strategy fund and they're economists they use economics to promote conservation and they're going to come out next year if all goes to plan and help us to do a livelihood assessment and see which of these potential livelihood strategies are most economically unviable we want to make sure that this young man living in the Kalahari growing up today has livelihood options and that he sees a value in living with cheetahs and other life other large carnivores in this incredible landscape if he wants to be a livestock farmer he's going to know how to do it as sustainably as possible if he wants to have is traditionally hizmet his the tease the medicinal herbs the honey that the Bushmen have collected for many hundreds of years and developed those into products we can help facilitate that process and if he wants to look into cultural and eco tourism initiatives they will be there and they will be creating a value for the wildlife to these people with which they share the land so I just want to finish off by saying a huge thank you to the solar project to all of you our wonderful supporters and encourage you to continue supporting us it is a collaborative effort we need all of your support to make sure that we can do the work that we do in the Kalahari and the other great projects we've heard about today and a huge thank you to WCN for these fantastic capacity-building initiatives [Applause]