The Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area spans five countries: Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. It is home to Africa's largest elephant population, and to communities whose lives and livelihoods depend on the health of the land.
Restoring a landscape like this is beyond any single organization or country. It depends on leaders who can work across borders, sectors, and interests, and who keep communities at the heart of decisions about the land they care for. Those communities also need to see tangible returns for that stewardship.
"Leadership can be lonely." The sentiment echoed around the circle when 45 conservation and restoration leaders from KAZA and surrounding landscapes gathered at Sikunga Conservancy in Namibia in June 2025 for the Lab's first Convening Circle.
Leaders working on landscape restoration face systemic barriers, and too often they face them alone, with collaboration shaped by competition for funding or donor-driven agendas rather than a shared vision. Rather than focusing primarily on NGO-led initiatives, the Leaders Lab builds a peer-supported community of leaders who work across sectors and bring about change at local, landscape, and systems levels.
Three lessons from Sikunga capture the approach. Leadership becomes lighter when it is carried together. Deep listening to communities, youth, NGOs, and donors can rebalance power and spark collective action. And transformation begins from within, as leaders strengthen their own teams and organizations before reaching outward.
The Lab runs in three phases:
The Lab is grounded in Commonland's 4 Returns framework, which looks beyond financial return per hectare to what makes a landscape healthy: inspiration that motivates people to act, social returns for community well-being, natural returns for ecosystem health and biodiversity, and financial returns that create sustainable livelihoods while protecting the environment.
By the end of the program, the Leaders Lab aims to leave behind:
As Dr. Nyambe of the KAZA Secretariat reminded participants at Sikunga: "The conservancy we are in today, Sikunga, was once just a dream. We should celebrate the steps taken so far."
Read more about the launch of the Leaders Lab in Victoria Falls on Commonland's website.
