The African Elephant Specialist Group (AfESG) is a voluntary group of carefully selected elephant experts who are part of the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The group’s voluntary co-Chairs, Rob Slotow from South Africa and Ben Okita-Ouma from Kenya, were appointed in 2018, taking over from our previous long-standing voluntary Chair, Holly Dublin. The group consists of 97 members who are mainly from, or living in, Africa and working at the forefront of evidence-based African elephant conservation and management. The members serve the AfESG on various task forces and working groups. The membership is reviewed and reappointed every four years.
The AfESG members meet every three years in the lead-up to the CITES Conference of the Parties (CoP) meetings to review the status, trends, and conservation initiatives for elephant populations. Members meet also at other events and conferences that they may be attending to share information. More recently group members and guests have spoken on several Zoom webinars. If you and your colleagues have elephant information and research you wish to share with the group, please contact the Secretariat who can arrange this for our members and other important stakeholders, as appropriate. Group members also provide articles and reports to one another on WhatsApp to improve the sharing of information.
Since it was formed in the mid-1970s, the AfESG has grown in size and complexity. It operates from a Secretariat in Nairobi, Kenya, hosted by the IUCN Eastern and Southern African Regional Office (ESARO), where three full-time staff (two also being members of the group) facilitate the AfESG’s main activities.