Actions Speak Louder Than Words: How PAMS Foundation Grew from Ground-Level Conservation to Tanzania's Anti-Trafficking Network
How We Grew PAMS Foundation by Krissie Clark and AfricaLive Editorial Team.
Key Points
- ✓ PAMS Foundation launched because three co-directors saw money flowing into Tanzanian conservation but very little having impact at ground level. Once work began supporting village game scouts, it became apparent that there was a massive elephant poaching crisis that redirected their entire trajectory toward combating organized wildlife crime.
- ✓ They took the fight to the top of trafficking networks—and criminals fought back. Rather than targeting subsistence farmers poaching out of desperation, PAMS partnered with a multi-agency unit to arrest higher-level traffickers. The syndicates targeted back: co-director Wayne Lotter was murdered in 2017. Staff were offered alternative work but every single person said "no way, we're even more motivated—we can't let them win."
- ✓ Philanthropic backing grew stronger through crisis. After Wayne's murder, the organization didn't collapse—it expanded. Built through donor-to-donor recommendations earned by excellent ground work rather than marketing, their 90% philanthropic base across multiple countries proved resilient. Today they're exploring blended finance through forest restoration, paying individuals directly rather than committees, with 30% of 300 participants already building better homes or starting businesses.
- ✓ Multiple environmental crises require the full ecosystem of organizations to survive. Tanzania faces population pressure, shrinking wildlife corridors, and degrading natural places. Though PAMS weathered 2025's US funding cuts, other NGOs supporting rangers and protected areas didn't—weakening the entire enforcement network. The sector needs new funding methods, genuine collaboration between organizations, and determination to keep fighting even when partners fall.
When Krissie Clark and two colleagues started PAMS Foundation in southern Tanzania, they'd seen a frustrating pattern: lots of money coming into the country for conservation work, but very little actually filtering down to the ground and making changes. They wanted to try something different - work that directly supported people on the ground. When they began supporting village game scouts to patrol, the first photos revealed a massive elephant poaching crisis. That discovery sent them in a direction they hadn't anticipated, building from modest beginnings into an organization working on anti-poaching, wildlife trafficking, forest restoration and community engagement - all whilst weathering funding storms that closed other organizations around them. Here Clark explains how they grew through donor recommendations rather than marketing, why the 2017 killing of their co-director made staff more determined, and how their forest restoration model puts money directly in individuals' pockets rather than committees.
Money Wasn't Reaching the Ground
The three of us who founded PAMS Foundation happened to be in southern Tanzania together at the time. From a wildlife biodiversity perspective, it's incredible - like the Super Bowl of wildlife. There's no fences. Animals roam in and out. It's like old Africa. People are living side by side with wildlife.
But we were seeing a lot of money coming into the country for conservation work, though very little was actually filtering down to the ground and making changes. The idea was to try to set up something and see if we could do something different.
My colleagues still had permanent jobs, but I was willing to step away from my own business. I had done some savings and was willing to see if I could get this NGO off the ground in the time that my savings would last. That was the birth of PAMS Foundation.
We didn't have a particular focus. We were open to any conservation work as long as we were making a difference for biodiversity, wildlife and people. But when we started, we happened to start with rangers on the ground - these village game scouts in southern Tanzania - trying to get them into more of a routine, being able to do patrols. They didn't have money, they didn't have equipment.
When we started off, we also didn't have much funds, but we did have some donated equipment: bicycles, binoculars, cameras and GPS units. We managed to motivate some of these village game scouts to go out on patrol, and at that time a bicycle was a very lucrative prize for villagers who completed the best patrols.
But when they started doing these patrols and came back, when we started downloading the photos of the illegal activities that they had marked with the cameras and GPS units, we noticed that there was a huge elephant poaching crisis. That really was the start of us going into trying to deal with that. That discovery changed our entire direction.
Fighting Poaching by Targeting The Traffickers At The Top of Criminal Organisations
Obviously we started off with the scouts and anti-poaching, but what we soon realized is that although having scouts or rangers on the ground is important because they create a presence, the people doing the illegal activities at that level are often subsistence farmers that have been tempted into it and they're doing it out of need. They're trying to feed their family. Somebody says to them, hey, we can offer you X amount of money if you go and shoot an elephant. They don't really want to do it, but it's such a big amount of money that they go into it. But they're not the ones really driving it.
So we saw there was a need to go higher up. We had to figure out a model of how to do that. Fortunately, we encountered a multi-agency unit in Tanzania that was actually dealing with other issues - Somali piracy actually at the time - but we managed to work with them to combat illegal wildlife trafficking. That worked really well because now we could support this unit to target higher-level traffickers.
That became our model - a bit of anti-poaching because that provided rangers on the ground, plus this team countering illegal wildlife trafficking who had real skills in investigation, intelligence, operations and prosecution.
But what we also realized is that you need information. A lot of this information comes from the communities living around the conservation areas. We thought that if we could help them with what they needed most - for example, human-elephant conflict was a big challenge. Elephants were coming in raiding their crops, which for them is massive. It means they can't feed their greater family for the whole year.
If we could help them prevent elephants raiding their crops, not only would it improve their livelihoods, but it would also reduce conflict between elephants and people. You'll have less people dying from elephant conflict, less elephants being killed out of conflict, but we would also build up amazing relationships with these people and trust. Then you start getting information about who's doing illegal activities.
So we combined this aspect together. We also did other activities like environmental education. You build relationships - the teacher builds good relationships with the kids, trust, and you feed information. Or helping them improve their agriculture. By doing some community conservation projects which was a win for conservation and for people, it also helped with the combating of illegal wildlife trafficking. That became our model.
Then later we also had an expert join us who's now one of our co-directors who had a lot of experience with forests. He was seeing how Tanzania has these incredible Afromontane forests and how they were disappearing. For us it also made sense because we had all this knowledge with regards to protecting and also community conservation work. It made sense for us to work on forests. That's how we ended up with this mix of community work with illegal wildlife trafficking and forest conservation work.
The Murder of Wayne Lotter And The Response From Our Staff: "We Can't Let Them Win"
As you start moving up the chain and you're working with various authorities to combat people involved in these illegal activities, the pushback gets more and more. In the earlier years, maybe people would discredit you to the local communities you were working with or to the local-level government. But then maybe in time they start - they see you more of a threat as you start assisting government to arrest higher-up people. Then maybe people in parliament might be smearing you in parliament, or they make your working conditions difficult. Or the good guys that you're working with maybe suddenly they get transferred or they stop them from doing their job. It's kind of like a game of chess where you do a move, they do a move.
For us it escalated and sadly in 2017 our co-director Wayne Lotter was killed. If you're being effective, people will go to extreme lengths to stop you.
What we thought was that the guys on the front line were more at risk, but we saw that these big networks worked out that you're the one that's doing a lot of the facilitating in terms of funding and maybe other activities. So if they can stop that, then they could effectively make the unit less impactful.
One needs to be creative and adaptive along the way. When Wayne was murdered, I think that was a huge lesson for us and we had to rethink how we did things. But I think other people working in the similar field also got a similar fright with it and a lot of people adapted to it. I know this happens in various activities around the world, but for us in the wildlife conservation community in East and Southern Africa and NGOs supporting this type of work, it was kind of a first for us.
What was interesting is when it did happen, we spoke to all of our staff saying look, obviously you know what type of work we're doing and you've seen the actions, so if anybody does want to change their work, we'll help you to look for alternate jobs. But what was incredible was that all the staff said no way, we're even more motivated and more fired up. Let's keep going. We can't let them win.
That was incredible. We have a real nice family culture within our organization where we laugh together, we cry together, we go through the difficult times together. I think that really helped us to move through some of these difficult times. By being adaptive and thinking of how you can be resilient has helped us to keep going.
Building Donor Relationships Through Results. Actions Speak Louder Than Words.
In the beginning, I wrote so many applications trying to look for funding. They all came back no, no, no, no, no. Eventually, somewhere there was a yes for a tiny bit of money. But somewhere along the line, that grew.
The big thing for us has been that actions have spoken louder than words. We've really focused on doing excellent work on the ground. What we've had is that donors have recommended us to other donors. That's actually ironic - I know that web presence and marketing is not our strength at all.
That's why I feel it's really important to focus on the action on the ground and do things, and that will start speaking for itself. Yes, it might take longer, but in the long run you'll be able to build strong relationships if you also focus on building really good relationships with the donors you do get.
For example, tell them the good news and the bad news when things are going wrong. They might not like hearing the bad news, but then they're more with you. They become a partner with you in it through the good times and the bad times, and they'll support you when you're going through the tough times.
My advice is just to not give up, keep trying, and really just be open, honest and transparent with the donors that you do get. If you're doing good work, people will start talking about you and others will start approaching you.
We rely largely on private philanthropists to fund our work. Approximately 90% of our funding is from private philanthropists and 10% or less is from aid and development funds. Really our model has been to focus on the private philanthropists and then also not to have all our eggs in one basket - to have multiple people funding us and also them being in different countries to reduce the risk if something does happen somewhere.
Another thing that we try to do is with our unrestricted money, we try not to use it so that it can act as a buffer for us. So when we do have incidents, we have that reserve.
When the Ecosystem Weakens
When US government funding disappeared from the conservation sector in 2025, we were fortunate. The cuts represented a small percentage of our budget - the bulk of it allocated to training programmes we could defer. We were able to weather it through our diversified funding model and the strength of relationships we'd built with private philanthropists over many years. Because we had such good relationships with several of our other donors, they actually reached out to us and some were able to provide not the full amount but little bits of money to keep us going for a few months while we were trying to figure out other options.
But for sure I heard also of many stories where people had to say goodbye to staff or close offices or sometimes nearly close down the whole organization. I think it was a big loss.
We are feeling the implications indirectly. Although we work with a multi-agency unit on illegal wildlife trafficking, we still rely on other NGOs who support rangers in different protected areas or undertake complementary conservation work. When they lost their funding, it meant the overall situation in Tanzania related to wildlife enforcement decreased. That's not good for the broader picture, and it ultimately affects our work too.
You cannot combat wildlife trafficking in isolation. The people you are countering operate as a network, so you must be a network yourself to counter them effectively. We work across various fields - collaborating with communities, law enforcement, and partners in other countries. When support organizations lose funding, the whole system weakens, even if your own organization remains standing.
That's where we've got to come together, work together, and we've also got to be creative in how we look for funding. For example, one might be looking in other fields - maybe in the agricultural sector or in health or some other sectors, but you can tell a story and a narrative to still be able to use that funding that can benefit what you want to do maybe for the wildlife side, but it also has a benefit on the agriculture side or a health side or something like that.
Collaboration is important, but it's also important that the collaboration isn't forced. It must be natural. You must work with like-minded people, people where you've built up trust. It's hard - you can't just put people in a room and force them to work together. It's got to come naturally. But for sure, putting people in a room starts to build that relationship which may lead to collaboration.
How To Create Value In A Tree Growing, Not In Cutting It Down
We're not resting on our philanthropic success. We are also starting to look at different mechanisms. For example, funds through carbon credits and maybe in time through biodiversity credits, so that it's more a blended model of financing.
We've gone into forest restoration, working with a certification body known as Plan Vivo. When all the criticism of carbon markets came - particularly around REDD+ projects about stopping deforestation - Plan Vivo really embraced it and tried to strengthen the way they do things. They have a strong focus on communities, on transparency, and on various safeguards. I think projects that are more about restoration and reforestation have actually grown, whilst avoidance projects lost credibility.
For our forest conservation and improved livelihoods work, we are using a mix of donor funding to fund some activities and also trying to get certification so that we can use money through the carbon markets to fund the projects. Hopefully in time, maybe the donor funding might reduce or wean off completely.
But I must add that getting the carbon certification has been incredibly hard to do. Something people should look out for is that there are many people and organizations out there that offer to be a broker for you. They can offer you money and advice or whatever, but they're in it not so much for the conservation - they're looking to take a big cut. One just has to be careful of that.
We've tried to not go the route of the broker, to try to do it ourselves, but we've had to work with people closely to get all the knowledge and experience in order to be able to do that. We're a not-for-profit, so for us the drive is not about making profit. It's about really making a difference on the ground.
How The Forest Restoration Model Works
Our big thing is about really being able to impact people at an individual level. Even our forest conservation project - when the project is generating money through carbon credits, it's actually going to individuals who are being paid. Individuals partner with the project in the sense that they volunteer their land if they have sufficient land to still grow their crops elsewhere. Then we work together to grow indigenous Afromontane trees on their land and they get payments for that.
People benefit through what we call base annual payments that they get, and also through casual labour. For this to happen, you have to have big nurseries where you are growing seedlings and caring for seedlings. You then need to clear the land, plant these trees, do weeding. If there's a fire you might need to do mortality replanting. So there's lots of work opportunities in that process too. It could also be in terms of collecting seeds.
Then on the same token, we also have the existing forest that we want to protect. Here we've empowered what we call village forest guards to go and do patrols there. They also get payments.
Somebody once said to me, "I can't eat a clinic," and that really resonated with me. We wanted it to come to an individual level, so at a household level you can see benefits.
These monies that are coming through - it's not a massive amount of money, but in their lives, we're talking about people who are extremely poor, so it is very useful funds. Our project is expanding and we have approximately 300 people who have joined the project. Of those, about 30% with their funds that they've got so far have managed to build better homes for themselves.
I also know one person who built a shop, so now he gets money from partnering with us but he also has a shop where he gets some income. Another person bought a milling machine, so then people pay him to mill maize. He was also able to buy a boda-boda, a motorbike that can act as transport in the area. So it's basically enabled people to start up little businesses or create better homes.
We hope in time - in the area we work, people are really poor. Some people's homes are just mud huts that have grass roofs. As they get a bit wealthier, they might put a tin roof over their house. Also they don't have beds that they're sleeping on, so they might get a bed in time. Often their kids - they don't have enough money to send their kids to school. Not that they have to pay school fees, but they still have to pay some food money or buy books and maybe uniform.
We're hoping that this project will enable them to send more kids to school. We're already seeing it happening and we're only a few years into the project.
What we're seeing is that in the past, the value of a tree for them typically was when you cut the tree down. Then the timber can be used to build things or you could sell it or you could use it for firewood. So their value from a tree was when it was dead. Now they are seeing value in a tree growing.
When you start talking to them, they all also know that in the past we used to have a lot more water in the rivers, we used to have a lot more rain, but since we cut down all the forest we don't have that anymore. They're also starting to make those connections and are wanting to bring that back. I think definitely by working with these people and rewarding them, we're on a better route in terms of long-term sustainability and conservation of these areas and benefit to the people.
Start Small, Promise Less, Deliver More
For someone starting a conservation or restoration organization in Africa today, I would definitely say start small and test the way you're doing and learn whilst you're doing it. I've seen many people start and somehow they get a lucky break and they get a big chunk of money, but they mess it all up because you haven't learned what works. Every area is different and you encounter different problems. So that would be my one thing - starting small.
Another thing would be about promising less and delivering more.
And then really focusing on action on the ground and less on media and marketing, with the belief that your actions will speak louder than words. Those would be my key things.
It's heartbreaking to see what's happening out there. In Tanzania, the population is growing exponentially. Tanzania was a country that had a lot of space for wildlife and we didn't have fences around our parks and we had these migration routes and dispersal routes. But now with population growing, people are competing - people and animals are competing for space. You're seeing these natural places, which is almost like Tanzania's oil because tourists come and it also provides good water and soil and all the rest, now degrading.
But I'm an optimist and so we've got to just keep fighting, keep trying, and at very least try to slow it down, but keep looking for solutions. Hopefully we can find some creative solutions that can still save these amazing wild places, but that is a win for people and wildlife and wild places.
The main thing is just that we've got to not give up, keep going and keep being adaptable, and try to build resilience within what we do so that we can keep going on for the long term. When we hit hurdles or knocks, it's just to not give up and to just keep going and try to find your pathway through the jungle.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is PAMS Foundation's core mission?
PAMS Foundation works across Tanzania on anti-poaching, wildlife trafficking prevention, forest restoration and community conservation. Their model combines ground-level rangers with intelligence-led operations targeting higher-level traffickers, supported by community engagement initiatives that address human-wildlife conflict and provide alternative livelihoods.
Why does PAMS target higher-level traffickers rather than local poachers?
PAMS recognized that local poachers are often subsistence farmers doing it out of desperation to feed their families, not the ones driving the illegal trade. By partnering with a multi-agency unit to target higher-level traffickers who organize and profit from wildlife crime, they address the root of the problem while using community programs to provide alternatives for local people.
How did PAMS Foundation survive after co-director Wayne Lotter's murder?
When PAMS offered staff alternative employment after Wayne's 2017 murder, every single person refused, saying they were more motivated than ever. The organization's family culture - laughing together, crying together, going through difficult times together - helped them adapt and become more resilient. Their diversified donor base built through excellent ground work also proved crucial.
How does PAMS Foundation's forest restoration model differ from traditional approaches?
PAMS pays individuals directly rather than committees. Participants volunteer their land to grow indigenous Afromontane trees and receive base annual payments plus casual labour income from nursery work, planting, and maintenance. About 30% of 300 participants have already built better homes or started businesses. The model shifts the value of trees from when they're cut down to when they're growing.
How did PAMS build their donor base without strong marketing?
PAMS grew through donor-to-donor recommendations earned by excellent ground work. They focused on transparent relationships - sharing both good news and bad news - so donors became partners through tough times. Their funding model relies approximately 90% on private philanthropists across multiple countries, with unrestricted reserves acting as buffers during crises.
What impact did 2025 US funding cuts have on Tanzania's conservation sector?
PAMS weathered the cuts through their diversified funding model, but many other NGOs supporting rangers and protected areas lost funding entirely. This weakened the entire enforcement network across Tanzania. Since wildlife trafficking networks operate as networks, losing partner organizations means the whole system becomes less effective, even for organizations that remain funded.
