EAGLE Network

EAGLE (Eco Activists for Governance and Law Enforcement) aims to protect elephants, apes, rhinos and other threatened wildlife species in key African countries from this large-scale poaching, by increasing the level of wildlife law enforcement in each country and deterring would-be poachers and traffickers from conducting these activities. The EAGLE Network has worked since 2003 on developing and refining a model for NGO-Government collaboration with the proven ability to bring about the effective enforcement of relevant laws. It first succeeded in Cameroon through the LAGA project, proving the model’s potential, shifting the country from a decade of zero wildlife prosecutions, to one major trafficker prosecuted per week; this took approximately seven months to achieve and has been consistently sustained for the past ten years. Since then the pioneering work has been replicated again and again, country by country and now there are seven encouraging replications, linked together under the umbrella of the EAGLE Network The country projects all aim to address the corruption and the poor governance that fuels the illegal wildlife trade that was viewed as increasingly important by stakeholders in both wildlife conservation and those working to address issues of the Rule of Law. The EAGLE network is leading the way in wildlife law enforcement across some of the most difficult African countries, through an innovative not-for-profit social franchising approach. The over-arching objective of the EAGLE Network is: Developing civic activism and collaborating with governments and civil society to improve the application of national and international environmental legislation, through a program of activities: investigations, arrests, prosecutions and publicity. Through this, EAGLE aims to generate a strong deterrent against the illegal trades in wildlife, timber and related criminal activities, including corruption.