Every Thursday evening in the yellow single-story building that houses Chikaya FM in Lundazi, Senior Ranger Mathews Mumbi leans toward the microphone and offers villagers a life-or-death piece of advice: avoid going out at night. The broadcast reaches across Zambia's Eastern Province into a transfrontier conservation area shared with Malawi, where human-wildlife conflict is not an abstract concern but a daily reality for half a million people living in farming communities.
The coexistence between people and wild animals in this region has become urgent. Four children have been killed by spotted hyenas since October in Lundazi and Lumezi districts alone—a tragedy that has made the twice-weekly radio show on Chikaya FM an essential lifeline. Sponsored by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), the program works with Zambia's Department of National Parks and Wildlife to offer practical guidance across three farming districts: Lundazi, Lumezi, and Chipangali. When callers phone in with questions—can my dogs kill a hyena if it attacks? how do I protect my goats?—Mumbi and his colleague Mwizaso Chipeta respond with careful, nuanced answers that acknowledge both villagers' fears and the animals' right to exist.
The crisis is recent and dramatic. Four years ago, 263 elephants were introduced to Kasungu National Park just across the border in Malawi. In that same year, elephants began appearing in farmers' fields in eastern Zambia for the first time since the 1970s, having crossed farmland, roads, and past schools and homesteads to reach lands that once belonged to them. The radio station addresses this shift directly, even running advertisements in the local language Tumbuka with the sound of an elephant trumpeting, reminding listeners that these animals are the pride of the country and belong to everyone.
But radio broadcasts, however vital, have limits. They reach primarily within Lundazi district and cannot cover every at-risk farmer in the vast farming areas along the border with Kasungu. That gap is where cutting-edge satellite technology fills the void. IFAW now tracks elephants using satellite collars fitted to 31 of the 300 to 400 elephants living in Kasungu. Because these collared animals are dominant females—each leading around seven to ten others—the collars effectively monitor most of the population through EarthRanger, a real-time wildlife monitoring software platform.
In a room near the radio station, IFAW's landscape conservation program manager Henry Ndaimani displays the live tracking map on his laptop. The system sends early-warning messages to thousands of farmers living in conflict-prone areas, allowing them to take precautions before elephant herds approach their fields. The blend of human expertise and technology—community radio paired with satellite intelligence—offers a model that respects both the needs of people and the movement of animals through landscapes that belong to neither alone.
This approach signals a shift: instead of choosing between wildlife protection and human survival, Zambia is learning to live with both.