Windhoek — Despite four Foot and Mouth disease checkpoints in just under 500 kilometres, I am prepared, for the first time since Independence, to describe the future for the Kavango and Caprivi regions as exciting. And this will be based on tourism, but not in the old style that we are accustomed to.

The Caprivi is the far-flung corner of our country, in the past often forgotten but recently, a region that has started receiving the attention it deserves with the promulgation of the Babwatwa National Park.

This vast conservation area is unique in the sense that it overturns the conventional (read colonial) paradigm based on a perceived conflict between conservation and development. The Caprivi is also so far east that, by law, the time does not change there in winter.

The promulgation of the Babwatwa National Park is the result of more than ten years of planning and consultation. During this period, the importance of conservation by local communities for local communities gradually dawned upon us. Once the legal framework was in place for conservancies, it quickly became a very popular vehicle to formalise the relationship between land and the people who live on it. It also created the structures within which investment is attracted to utilise the vast earning potential from tourism, envisaged by the policy makers and hoped for by the rural communities.

The Babwatwa National Park encompasses a vast stretch of land starting east of the Kavango River in the Mahangu, and stretching right across the Western Caprivi to the Kwando River. Across the river it links to the Mudumu and Mamili National Parks in the Eastern Caprivi creating a conservation corridor between equally vast conservation areas in Angola, Zambia and Botswana. This is what will hopefully become, somewhere in the future, the KAZA (Kavango Zambezi) Trans-frontier conservation area.

Babwatwa is unique in its conservation and development model. It consists of A, B and C zones ranging from full human utilisation, to regulated utilisation to core conservation areas. The whole area is mostly unfenced and there is also very little remaining fencing between it, Angola in the north and Botswana in the south. Administration of the core conservation areas is the easiest.

All we had to do was remove the military structures, prevent poaching and 18 years after Independence, the wildlife has restored itself to a very significant level. The A zones are also not that difficult. These areas are already settled and I predict they will develop in similar fashion as the rest of rural Namibia is developing. The tricky ones are the so-called limited utilisation areas.

In these areas, if I understand government's intentions correctly, the focus will be both on conservation and on community development. This is not as simple as it seems. It means these areas will attract and host wildlife that spills over from the core conservation areas. In the B zones, private hunting outfits will tender for hunting concessions, similar as in the past, but the benefits must increase significantly for the communities living in these areas.

Its other leg stands on the concept of developing upmarket lodges to attract affluent tourists to create further income for the communities. And it goes without saying, that in all these endeavours, employment for the various projects must first come from the villages. This is what will prove to be perhaps the most difficult to achieve.

Earlier this year a church delegation from South Africa visited me on their way to see various government officials, to elicit local support for an upmarket lodge near Masambo. Part of the project will include a training centre near the old Omega. This investment is not profit driven per se but it has to make a substantial profit to pay for all the other charity objectives set by the Kwe-San Development Community, which is the legal entity behind the initiative.

The aim is to grow an income for the Kwe in the Caprivi, arguably one of the most marginalised groups in Namibia, and to establish the structures needed for the future development of these societies. Until the actual existence of the Babwatwa National Park in law, all of these intentions had to float on fairly insubstantial promises and undertakings.

Like the Namib Desert, which now houses several dozen upmarket lodges, the Babwatwa National Park has become in my view, one of the most exiting areas to put community development and conservation together in one package that really delivers the goods for the local people. Already there is much talk of a large, very grand lodge in the Buffalo area, supported by the Ministry of Environment and Tourism.

With its almost unlimited, largely unspoilt wilderness areas acting as feeder zones for the other areas, and now encased in a legal framework, it will become a catalyst for development. And the big difference for the local communities is that they get to keep their cattle and their goats, plus they participate with their labour, plus they earn levies from the tourism industry.

I am confident that this model will one day be applied worldwide to the benefit, both of indigenous communities, and of nature.