WCN supports dedicated individuals who have demonstrated exceptional promise for lifelong leadership as wildlife conservationists.  The Sidney Byers Scholarship and the Pat J. Miller Scholarship provide grants for graduate education and applied training to students from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America who are committed to working on wildlife conservation in their home countries.  Scholarship candidates are nominated by WCN’s Partner conservationists.  They expand upon the ground-breaking work of our Partners, while gaining the skills they will need to pioneer projects of their own in the future.  To date, WCN has awarded 11 scholarships to women and men working in Mongolia, Namibia, Kenya, Argentina, Russia, China, Ethiopia and Chile.

WCN supporter Stephen Gold initiated a project to provide solar energy to six conservation projects in Africa.  Meeting the great need for electricity in remote field stations, this innovative endeavor combines cutting-edge technology with wildlife conservation and sustainable environmental practices.  With generous donations from corporations and individuals, Stephen designed and assembled new solar electricity systems and shipped the equipment to the field.  We have provided solar electricity to those protecting African wild dogs, cheetahs, elephants, lions and Ethiopian wolves, and the project continues to grow.  We are now working on solar power systems for projects in South America. Learn more at: www.wcnsolarproject.org

The wildlife conservation community in sub-Saharan Africa has been hard-hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  Individuals dedicated to saving wildlife are fighting for their own lives, and the conservation effort faces the enormous loss of their professional skills and innovative contributions.  The Wildlife Conservation Network is creating an integrated intervention model addressing the needs of prevention, testing, counseling and treatment for the field-based staff of conservation programs.  Our model will be refined through a series of field-tested pilot programs and rolled out to over half of the 400 conservation programs in sub-Saharan Africa by the end of 2012.