African Elephant Conservation Fund

In 1988, Congress passed the African Elephant Conservation Act in response to the alarming decline of African elephant populations. The Act provides for the establishment of the African Elephant Conservation Fund to provide financial assistance to support projects that will enhance sustainable conservation programs to ensure effective, long-term conservation of African elephants. This is a notice of intent to award a grant without competition to an individual recipient. The recipient is being engaged to conduct an economic analysis of the value of wildlife trophy hunting in Tanzania that can be used to better understand the importance and the economic value of the sector in relation to overall Tanzania Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This consultancy is being awarded in response to a specific request for assistance from Tanzania's Wildlife Division and the Ministry of Tourism, and USAID-Tanzania. Because elephants were, until recently, sport-hunted by American clients in Tanzania, the results have direct relevance to elephant conservation. In this phase of the project, the consultant will work with the Wildlife Division to collect information on revenue collected on the game reserves and concessions operated in Tanzania, and will analyze these with respect to other African countries where similar data have been collected in order to assess the value of the sector and its performance relative to other hunting countries. Future phases will include analyzing various scenarios to determine the impact that various policy or fee changes would have on the profitability and the sustainability of the sector. As outlined in 505 DM 2, the recipient meets the following criteria: Unsolicited proposal: the proposed award is the result of an unsolicited application that represents a unique or innovative idea, method, or approach that is not the subject of a current or planned award, but is found to be advantageous to program objectives; and Unique qualifications: the applicant is uniquely qualified to perform the activity based on a variety of demonstrable factors such as location; property ownership; voluntary support capacity; cost-sharing ability, if applicable; technical expertise; or other such unique qualifications. The recipient is uniquely qualified to do this assignment because he conducted previous assessments in Tanzania in the past, has published several widely respected papers on the topic, and in recent months he has conducted similar assessments in other African countries. He therefore has a wealth of experience, knowledge, and data that make him the most qualified individual to complete this task in an efficient, timely manner and to yield results that can be directly compared to results from other countries.