Local conservationist selected for global programme

Local wildlife conservationist, Moreangels Mbizah has been selected as a TED Fellow, joining a class of 20 global change-makers invited to this year’s conference in Vancouver, Canada, in April.

By Moses Mugugunyeki

Moreangels Mbizah

The TED Fellows programme brings together young innovators from around the world and across disciplines, who display both outstanding achievement and exemplary character, to raise international awareness of their work and maximise their impact.

“I am excited about being selected as a TED Fellow. This will provide me with a great platform to showcase my work and bring the world’s attention to conservation and the threats that lions and other wildlife species are facing,” Mbizah said.

“I am looking forward to being part of the TED community, where I will be able to interact with, learn from and be inspired by change-makers from various fields across the world.

“Meeting some of the TED Fellows at the TED 2019 Conference who are doing innovative and extra-ordinary work in their disciplines would inspire me to keep fighting and doing my best in making this world a better place for all humans and animals.”

Mbizah was selected for her work in protecting lions and their habitat, and developing innovative community-based conservation methods.

“I have, for the past 10 years, been working towards the conservation of wildlife and wild spaces in Zimbabwe. For the past five years, I have been studying lions with the aim of understanding the effect of prey availability on the ecology and behaviour of lions,” she said.

“I have now just founded the Zambezi Valley Lion Project, which is working on identifying threats facing lions in Zimbabwe’s Zambezi Valley landscape and finding and implementing innovative approaches to tackling these threats.”

Mbizah said the project also works to protect other large carnivores in the area and promoting the co-existence between people and wildlife through interventions to reduce big cat mortalities, building and maintaining livestock enclosures.

Mbiza is renowned for the film titled Outnumbered In Africa, which was supported by National Geographic and showcases “my story as a black African woman scientist working in Africa”.