African parks leads on staff growth amid plans to localise ops

From the newsletter

African Parks has outpaced peers with a 9% increase in senior staff growth, a total of 50 new hires over the past year. Our review, using LinkedIn data, indicates that African Parks has achieved the highest growth rate in both general hirers and business development staff at 9% and 8% respectively. African Parks also appears to be localising staffing increasingly. 

• Drawing on an annual budget of $166 million, AP is opening an academy in Rwanda to train African conservation professionals, with the first students expected to enroll next year. 

• Wildlife Conservation Society, Peace Parks Foundation and The Nature Conservancy also recorded high general staff growth among all the top 10 conservation organisations in Africa with 35, 18 and 18 new hires respectively.

• We tracked the senior workforce growth of BirdLife International, Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), The Nature Conservancy, Peace Parks Foundation, IUCN and African Parks. 

• Of the 10 organisations, BirdLife International is the only organisation actively shrinking across both metrics, seeing a 3% reduction in overall staff and a sharp 33% drop in sales and business development staff.

• Despite continued overall staff growth, staffing strategies within sales and business development teams are diverging. Larger organisations such as WWF and WCS reduced their sales & BD teams by 5% and 2% respectively. In contrast, regional players including Endangered Wildlife Trust and African Wildlife Foundation expanded these teams by 13% and 8% respectively.

• BirdLife International stands out for its highly academic and stable workforce, with the highest proportion of employees holding Master’s degrees (62%) alongside a strong average staff tenure of 7.6 years. World Wide Fund for Nature records the highest overall staff loyalty, with employees staying an average of 7.9 years. 

• Peace Parks Foundation combines the sector’s highest average industry experience at 16.3 years with a comparatively short organisational tenure of 3.2 years, suggesting the organisation is actively recruiting experienced external talent to support its recent 11% growth. 

Our take

• Conservation organisations are increasingly building revenue-focused teams and investing in African-led talent pipelines to strengthen long-term financial sustainability. 

• While larger global organisations such as WWF and WCS appear to be consolidating mature fundraising structures, smaller and regional players are aggressively scaling business development capacity to compete for funding.