Rwanda’s Volcano National Park gets conservation boost from African Wildlife Foundation and TUI
A new initiative to support community-driven conservation and biodiversity science has been launched in Rwanda.
The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) and the TUI Care Foundation have established a pioneering initiative to support community-driven conservation and biodiversity science in the renowned Volcanoes National Park of Rwanda.
The two-year TUI Wildlife Program Rwanda aims to strengthen biodiversity monitoring and foster greater youth and community engagement in conservation.
Home to the iconic mountain gorilla, Volcanoes National Park represents one of Africa’s most critical conservation landscapes.
Thanks to decades of protection efforts, gorilla numbers have steadily increased.
But with the park’s limited size and mounting pressures from surrounding human development and climate change, new conservation tools and partnerships are urgently needed.
Through this initiative, cutting-edge environmental DNA technology (eDNA) will be introduced to the park for the first time.
By collecting genetic material from soil and water, eDNA enables scientists to monitor species and ecosystem health more accurately – laying the foundation for smarter, data-driven conservation decisions.
These insights will be combined with satellite imagery and on-the-ground reporting to inform future planning and park management.
The second pillar of the project is local capacity building.
Community members living near the park will be trained and equipped to support wildlife and habitat monitoring.
Their work will help track changes in biodiversity, habitat quality, and human-wildlife interactions, feeding into a cloud-based platform to inform real-time conservation responses.
The project will also ignite a passion for conservation amongst young people. 200 students from ten local schools will participate in educational park visits, debates and writing competitions.
In partnership with the University of Rwanda, young professionals will be trained in eDNA sampling and analysis – building Rwanda’s next generation of highly qualified conservation scientists.
This work is delivered in collaboration with key national and regional institutions, including the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, the Rwanda Development Board, the University of Rwanda’s Center for Biodiversity, and the International Gorilla Conservation Programme.
It also directly contributes to Rwanda’s national conservation strategy and supports global commitments under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
The partnership builds on a successful collaboration between African Wildlife Foundation and the TUI Care Foundation in Kenya’s Tsavo landscape.
In both regions, the shared goal is clear: invest in local people, scientific innovation and sustainable conservation that benefits both nature and communities.
The TUI Care Foundation’s ‘Tourism for Development Month´ is a month of activities dedicated to projects set in Least Developed Countries.
Through a series of project launches and educational activities, it focuses on how sustainable tourism can increase the capacity of destination communities and empower them to improve their livelihoods, conserve and regenerate nature, and create market-based solutions that benefit tourism destinations.
The projects are supported through the TUI Care Foundation’s Tourism for Development Fund, which commits €10 million by 2030 to empower Least Developed Countries, a joint pledge of TUI Care Foundation and United Nations Tourism.