On a bitingly cold night in Lapalala Wilderness nature reserve in South Africa’s Limpopo province, Duncan Kanyakera watches as instructor Jacques Viljoen deploys a thermal drone in search of a lone cheetah. Once the drone has disappeared into the inky sky, Kanyakera, from Tsavo in Kenya, and 20 other conservation professionals from across Africa turn their attention to the open-air screen in anticipation. Many of the students – from 11 African countries as far flung as Benin, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar – witnessing the demonstration have earned their places at Lapalala after performing well on an online training programme for protected area technicians (PAT) run by the Connected Conservation Foundation (CCF).
Also on the course, are five members of Peace Parks staff in training. Over the years, the CCF has “identified a critical gap”, says Carien Soldatos who oversees the PAT training programme: “Tech is fantastic, but it all depends on having trained technicians on the ground. Without people who know how to use, repair and maintain them, the fanciest gizmos in the world aren’t much use.” While there are such people in some parks, they are sorely lacking in many parts of Africa.
After searching everywhere for a tech course aimed at conservation professionals, the CCF decided to create its own. Their 10-module course, which launched in July 2025, was a global first. In the first year, 680 people from all over the world finished at least one module.
Those who completed all 10 modules were invited to interviews, with the top 16 chosen to attend the practical component at Lapalala. In less than 10 minutes, the heat sensor technology in the drone launched by Viljoen locates the cheetah resting with her cubs. Once he has locked its location, the operator sends a pin to the park’s on-duty field rangers, who rush to the scene.
But we could see exactly what was happening as the rangers got out of their vehicle and checked up on her.” Kanyakera, who works for the Taita Taveta Wildlife Conservancies Association (TTWCA) to support a network of 35 conservancies and ranches in Kenya’s vast Tsavo landscape, recognised immediately how handy a drone would be back home. Human-wildlife conflict is a challenge in Tsavo: “If an elephant gets into a corn field, it causes havoc,” he says. But this gets tricky in the dry season when animals and humans alike are drawn towards water.
Currently, if Kanyakera gets reports of an elephant near a village, he has to first work out where the elephant is and which direction it is moving in, before deploying rangers to intervene. And if that doesn’t work, I can deploy rangers much more accurately.” While a night-vision drone is the most exciting item on Kanyakera’s Christmas list, the course has also shown him how simple changes could drastically improve the tech “stack” back in Tsavo. This has a lot to do with the course design, explains Maxwell: “Each day, they build a new element of the stack,” she says, “before breaking it down at the end of each day and building it again the next morning to add another layer.
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