A farmer lost lions to raids. Now he protects them.

More than 40 community rangers now patrol 40,000 square kilometres of north-west Namibia's Kunene region, tracking a recovering population of desert lions with smartphones, camera traps and GPS collars. The Lion Rangers programme, launched in 2018, covers 11 conservancies from the Skeleton Coast to the edge of Etosha national park. Rangers walk up to 40km a day, logging sightings and tracks into free conservation software that sends locations to patrol leaders and, increasingly, to farmers directly. Benjamin Kordom, the field coordinator, joined after three lions raided his family farm south of Khorixas, where his children had only seen the animals in schoolbooks. Human-lion conflict fell by a third by 2023, and in six conservancies illegal lion killings have stopped entirely. The technology has limits. Rangers still read tracks the way their great-grandparents taught them. "I will never live without farming," Kordom says. "Let's try to live together with these lions."