The Ministry of Environment, Forestry, and Tourism is developing a five-year National Human-Wildlife Conflict Action Plan.

The action plan comes after the Cabinet's approval of the resolutions of the first National Conference on Human-Wildlife Conflict Management that was held earlier this year.

Cabinet directed the ministry to develop a five-year action plan for implementation of the resolution within three months.

The Deputy Executive Director of MEFT, Colgar Sikopo, said, "The three months are actually from July to the end of September, we have already started to work on the action plan, we are consulting internally, and our time frame is that by the second week of August we should have a final draft at a ministry level of the action plan that the minister can take to cabinet, and if cabinet approves this action plan, we expect it to be enforced or implemented as of September 1st this year."

Cabinet also directed the Ministry of Finance and Public Enterprise to consider the allocation of funding through the normal budgetary process under the 2023–2024 additional budget to address some of the urgent resolutions from the conference.

"We will be making our request to the Ministry of Finance. We have started the process of requesting an additional budget, so we are working to make our submission in the next week. It's difficult to say how much, but from our side, we are picking up on the priority resolutions that we see should be implemented now in this financial year. From there, we will be making our submission, but we cannot confirm how much."

Cabinet also further authorised the ministry to raise external funding to support and complement budgetary provisions from the Treasury.

Sikopo says the ministry is engaging stakeholders to source funds to address the challenges of human-wildlife conflict.

"We are already engaging on specific resolutions that need to be addressed, and we already have some positive reactions from some organisations on their willingness to assist on specific resolutions, especially issues dealing with human elephant conflict and human predator conflict. We see some positive responses from different organisations who may want to assist."

Once available, funds will be used to address key priority areas such as a lack of resources, the recruitment of more staff to respond to cases, and supporting communities and farmers by providing alternative water points, predator-proof kraals, and the creation of crocodile enclosures.