A year later, our founder, Dr. Andrew Stein launched a community engagement program, called ‘Pride in Our Prides’, to determine the root causes of the conflicts and promote peaceful coexistence between villagers and lions. With his graduate student, Eric LeFlore and field assistants Pro Tomeletso and Chris Dimbindo, on the ground, the team took a compassionate approach to mitigating conflict by assessing the scale of the problem and sharing information about lions for improved outcomes. Henceforth, we set about our mission in the heart of Kavango-Zambezi Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA) and in 2014, CLAWS was founded.

In 2015, we fitted 6 lions with satellite tracking collars. With a basic understanding of regional lion ecology and movement patterns, we developed our Lion Alert System. In its infancy, we manually sent out messages to participating farmers to warn them when collared lions were approaching their cattle posts. Concurrently, we constructed livestock enclosures(kraals) from woven mats of sustainably harvested branches for local farmers who had suffered substantial cattle losses to predators. With a range of models and structures, we sought to compare their effectiveness in preventing lion predation. A year later, we started using GPS trackers on cattle to monitor their movement and better understand the changing patterns of movement between seasons. With this data in hand, we incorporated it into the lion alert system to improve its accuracy: The movement of cattle and lions were monitored and we were able to collect clearer data.

Our greatest leap occurred when we partnered with the University of Siegen (Germany) to develop the first-of-its-kind automated, adaptable alert system. As collared lions move across the landscape, their locations are incorporated into a cloud-based algorithm to calculate their distance to registered cattle posts, homesteads and villages and deliver real-time messages directly to individual cell phones when lions are nearby. The individuals share their preferred warning type based on language (English or Setswana) or media (text or voicemail) for the most actionable result (see our program Pride in Our Prides).