SADC-TWIXRegional Workshop Proceedings

The mandate for the establishment of the SADC-Trade in Wildlife Information eXchange (SADC-TWIX) emanates from the SADC Law Enforcement and Anti-Poaching (LEAP) Strategy that was approved by Ministers responsible for Environment and Natural Resources in 2015 and endorsed by the Joint Committee of Ministers of Environment and Natural Resources and of the Organ on Politics, Defense and Security Cooperation in 2017.

The overall objective of the SADC LEAP Strategy is to significantly reduce the level of poaching and illegal trade in wild fauna and flora and enhance law enforcement capacity in the SADC Region by 2021. The LEAP strategy explicitly identifies the establishment of a TWIX system, an Internet tool for information exchange amongst the law enforcement agencies in the region, as one of its key deliverables.

With funding from a global German funding initiative, the Partnership against Poaching and Illegal Wildlife Trade (Ivory and Rhino-Horn) in Africa and Asia, implemented by GIZ on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), TRAFFIC has conducted TWIX scoping missions in the SADC region, introduced the TWIX concept and invited law enforcement agencies to nominate TWIX focal points and users. To date 316 TWIX users have been nominated from 10 countries out of the 11 visited SADC Member States.

It was against this background, and to maintain the momentum built during the scoping missions and based on the high level of expectation and need for the TWIX system to become operational, that a regional workshop formally to launch the system was convened on the 9th and 10th April in Johannesburg, South Africa at the Garden Court hotel, OR Tambo International Airport.

The workshop was jointly funded by the aforementioned German Partnership against Poaching and Illegal Wildlife Trade and the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs within the US Department of State (the latter via a grant to Conservation International).