A Year in Review – Conservation Wins in 2025

To love nature is to feel an unshakeable urge to share it, to speak of it, to invite others into it, believing that only through presence can care truly take root. Yet such invitations come with a responsibility: to ensure that what moves and inspires us today endures to do the same tomorrow.

Conservation requires finding a balance between opening the door and guarding the threshold; it’s a quiet, enduring commitment we’re proud to have made and upheld, alongside our partners, Singita Lowveld Trust (SLT), Grumeti Fund, and The Malilangwe Trust.

As we commence a new year of dedication to conservation and community, it's worth reflecting on some of the things we accomplished together over the past year, before carrying our shared purpose – to care for Africa, its biodiversity, communities, and landscapes – forward in 2026.

In 2025, 22 Singita Community Culinary School (SCCS) students completed their final Prue Leith Exams, graduating as professional chefs. This raises the total number of SCCS graduates to 231 across our campuses.

The Long Run, Singita’s sustainability partner, audited each of our properties to determine the effectiveness and pervasiveness of our sustainability initiatives, offering high praise for our commitment to ensuring our operations remain light on the earth.

⁠Care for Wild rhino sanctuary, which the SLT supports, welcomed 25 new calves born to orphans that have been rehabilitated and rewilded at their facility in South Africa. SLT also continues to provide ongoing strategic support for rhino dehorning projects across the Greater Kruger area. Recent research shows this to be a highly cost-effective measure, reducing regional poaching activity by 78%. The Anti-Poaching Unit at Singita Sabi Sand rolled out new AI Thermal technology to bolster its surveillance capabilities. This has greatly improved the team’s ability to intercept and prevent poaching activity across the region.

The 17 Early Childhood Development Centres that SLT supports span 11 communities that neighbour our Singita Sabi Sand and Singita Kruger National Park concessions. Resources were focused here on equipping classrooms, outdoor playgrounds, and installing shade areas. These centres have supported over 5500 children since 2019.

⁠More than 340 children aged 4–5 years were assessed as part of the early learning outcomes measure approach to tracking their development and emotional readiness for formal schooling.

The Malilangwe Trust, in collaboration with Gonarezhou Conservation Trust, the Government of Zimbabwe, and the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, successfully relocated 30 white rhinos from the Malilangwe Wildlife Reserve to its southern neighbour, Gonarezhou National Park. White rhinos now roam this property for the first time in nearly a century, and this achievement makes a future in which a viable metapopulation is possible here, in Zimbabwe’s second-largest national park.

In 2025, in partnership with the Grumeti Fund, we hosted the first Wagora Bike Ride – a five-day event which includes a 150-kilometre cycle across our Grumeti concession in Tanzania over three days, held in honour of Kitaboka Wagora, a ranger who was tragically killed by a poacher in 2008 – and the eighth annual Serengeti Girls Run, a multi-stage, all-female endurance run, also through the reserve. The events were hugely successful, raising significant funding for regional Anti-Poaching projects and empowerment programmes for girls and women in rural Tanzania, respectively.

Regular wildlife sightings – including buffalo, antelope, elephants, jackals, servals, hyenas, golden cats, golden monkeys, and even the Rwenzori turaco, an indigenous bird lost to the area for some time – are testament to the ongoing success of our regional rewilding project.

A two-metre-tall buffalo stone wall was built at the base of our property, to protect community land but preventing buffalos from raiding crops, which has resulted in a 99% decrease in illegal grazing, cropping, harvesting, snaring, and greatly improved human-wildlife conflict.

Over the course of the year, 23 10,000-litre water tanks were installed at schools in villages adjacent to our property, a water pipeline and tap systems were extended to two nearby villages, and we helped procure health insurance for over 2500 poorly resourced households and individuals in the region.

⁠We welcomed a new Concession Manager and Community Development Liaison to our Singita Okavango Delta team, in anticipation of Elela’s opening in December 2026. This marks the start of our long-term partnerships and strong relationships with conservation entities and communities across the Delta region.