Iona National Park — GEF-Financed Transfrontier Conservation & Climate Resilience Programme (Angola)

Iona National Park, a roughly 15,200 km² desert and coastal protected area in Angola's Namibe Province established in 1937 and formalised in 1964, has been the focus of successive internationally financed conservation programmes aimed at restoring management capacity after decades of civil-war disruption. Between February 2013 and April 2018, the European Development Fund contracted €3,900,000 (against a total project cost of €6,225,996) to the United Nations Development Programme to establish and strengthen management of Angola's protected-area network, with Iona as a priority site.

In 2021 the Global Environment Facility approved a follow-on, seven-year project (2021-2028) worth $41.3 million in total, anchored by a $14.8 million GEF grant and co-financing of roughly $26.3 million from the Government of Angola and partner organisations including Conservation International, African Parks, Peace Parks Foundation, The Nature Conservancy and the International Conservation Caucus Foundation, with additional support from Germany's KfW Development Bank and Norway's NORAD. The project targets improved management of 3.8 million hectares of protected terrestrial area across Iona and Luengue-Luiana National Parks — both part of cross-border conservation landscapes — and enhanced protection for 17 globally threatened species, alongside 35,000 hectares of community land brought under climate-resilient management.

Community engagement is an explicit component: at least 38,000 people are direct beneficiaries of the programme, roughly 14,000 of whom gain enhanced capacity to identify and respond to climate risks, with an estimated 250,000 people benefiting indirectly; earlier phases of the work reported over 17,000 household engagements on human-wildlife conflict awareness carried out by 90 trained community volunteers.

As a caveat, the GEF-7 project's headline hectare, beneficiary and species targets are largely forward-looking commitments for a programme still in its early-to-middle years (approved 2021, running to 2028) rather than independently verified outcomes, so the strength of evidence here rests more on the scale and transparency of committed, disbursing multilateral finance than on completed impact evaluation.

Read more: https://www.thegef.org/newsroom/news/gef-council-approves-project-bolster-management-and-resilience-angolas-conservation

Read the full analysis: https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/angola/national-biodiversity-project-conservation-iona-national-park_en