Zambia’s National Parks

SOME OF AFRICA’S LAST GENUINELY WILD PLACES

Zambia has 20 national parks covering approximately 8 percent of its total land area. Together with the Game Management Areas that surround them, protected landscapes account for 38 percent of the country — one of the highest proportions on the continent. These are not nominal designations. Zambia’s parks are genuinely wild: vast, largely unfenced, and connected to the surrounding landscape in ways that allow wildlife to move as it always has.

Three parks define the system and anchor the regions where ZWCF works. But a park is only as strong as the landscape that surrounds it.

The Buffer Zones That Determine Everything

Each of Zambia’s three major parks is surrounded by multiple Game Management Areas. South Luangwa is buffered by Lupande (Mfuwe), Lumimba (Mwanya), Munyamadzi, and several others. Kafue is ringed by GMAs including Mumbwa, Kasonso Busanga, Lunga Luswishi, Mulobezi, Namwala, and Nkala, among a few others. North Luangwa is bordered by Mukungule, Musalangu (Chifunda), and the Munyamadzi Corridor to the south. Together, these buffer zones more than double the effective conservation footprint of each park.

The quality of a national park over time is not determined by what happens inside its boundaries alone. It is determined by what happens in the GMAs around it. When communities in those buffer zones have a genuine economic stake in wildlife — when they benefit from its presence through employment, revenue, infrastructure, and food — they protect it. When they do not, pressure builds at the boundary: illegal activity increases, habitat converts, and the park becomes progressively more isolated. The

wildlife inside does not disappear overnight. But the system that sustains it begins to fail.

This is the argument at the center of everything ZWCF does. We do not work inside the parks. We work in the communities whose land forms the buffer — because that is where the long-term outcome for Zambia’s wildlife is actually decided.

South Luangwa National Park

South Luangwa covers 9,050 square kilometers in eastern Zambia, running along the Luangwa River through one of the most productive wildlife corridors in Africa. It is widely regarded as one of the finest game parks on the continent — not because of what has been done to it, but because of what has been preserved.

The park holds some of the highest concentrations of leopard, lion, elephant, and African wild dog found anywhere. Thornicroft’s giraffe, endemic to the Luangwa Valley, exists nowhere else on earth. The walking safari was pioneered here, and South Luangwa remains the standard against which walking safari experiences across Africa are measured.

ZWCF’s deepest presence is in the landscapes surrounding South Luangwa — in the Lupande Game Management Area, Mwanya Chiefdom, and Chibembe Wildlife Reserve. The communities who live alongside this park are the foundation of everything ZWCF does in the valley.

Kafue National Park

Kafue is one of the largest national parks in Africa, covering over 22,000 square kilometers of central Zambia. It encompasses an extraordinary range of habitats — miombo woodland, floodplain, riverine forest, and the legendary Busanga Plains in the north, where lions hunt buffalo across open grassland at a scale rarely seen elsewhere.

The Kafue River runs through the park from north to south, sustaining one of the most productive freshwater systems on the continent. Kafue supports all of the major predators, large herds of buffalo and elephant, and a diversity of antelope species including cheetah — rare in much of Zambia but present in Kafue in meaningful numbers.

African Parks has managed Kafue since 2021 through Greater Kafue Landscape Limited, bringing significant conservation investment and organizational capacity to a park that had long been underleveraged relative to its ecological value. ZWCF operates in the Mumbwa Game Management Area on Kafue’s eastern boundary — one of the park’s most critical buffer zones.

North Luangwa National Park

North Luangwa is one of Africa’s most remote and least visited parks. It covers 4,636 square kilometers in the upper Luangwa Valley and receives almost no commercial tourism — by design. The park is managed as a wilderness area, with access restricted to a small number of walking safari operators and conservation teams.

North Luangwa is the site of one of Africa’s most significant black rhino recovery programs. Frankfurt Zoological Society has worked in the North Luangwa ecosystem for nearly four decades in partnership with DNPW, gradually rebuilding a rhino population that had been devastated by poaching. The program is one of the genuine conservation success stories of the continent, and it depends entirely on the integrity of the surrounding landscape.

ZWCF operates in the Chifunda Game Management Area, which forms a direct buffer on the park’s eastern boundary along more than 40 miles of the Luangwa River. The communities of Chifunda Chiefdom are ZWCF’s partners in protecting one of the most ecologically significant and most exposed boundaries in the entire Luangwa system.

These three parks — and the buffer zones that surround them — represent some of the most important wildlife landscapes remaining in Africa. ZWCF exists to ensure that the communities living alongside them have every reason to keep them that way.