Niassa Province

Niassa Province exists because the miombo woodland exists—42,300 square kilometers of Africa's largest and wildest protected area sheltering the continent's last great elephant herds in terrain too remote for easy exploitation. The Niassa Special Reserve, spanning eight districts across Niassa and neighboring Cabo Delgado, represents 31% of Mozambique's protected land and harbors what surveillance has confirmed as zero poached elephants since 2018—seven years of conservation success in a region that had lost half its elephants to poaching between 2009 and 2014.

The recovery required intervention at scale. Poaching had driven the elephant population from over 10,000 to 3,675 by 2016. The Wildlife Conservation Society, the Niassa Conservation Alliance, and the Mozambican government deployed a coordinated strategy beginning in 2018: helicopters chartering wet-season patrols, digital radio systems enabling rapid response, and scouts deployed to remote elephant concentrations. USAID's Aerial Vigilance Programme funded monitoring that tracked not just elephants but illegal mining and logging across the reserve.

The reserve today holds 4,000-4,500 elephants alongside Africa's most significant populations of lion (1,000-1,200), leopard, wild dog (400-450), sable, kudu, wildebeest, and zebra. This concentration of charismatic megafauna in functioning ecosystems—not isolated in fenced enclosures—represents what conservation biologists call a flagship site: proof that protection can work at scale.

In 2024, Mozambique commemorated seven years without poaching with 'Madala' ('old man' in Xichangana)—a life-size elephant sculpture in Maputo constructed from firearms and ammunition seized from poachers over 25 years.

By 2026, Niassa tests whether conservation success can persist as the insurgency in neighboring Cabo Delgado stretches security resources thin.