Garamba National Park spans 5,133 km2, with 9,662 km2 of adjacent domaines de chasse, and is situated in the north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) bordering South Sudan. It is one of Africa’s oldest national parks, designated in 1938, and in 1980 was declared a World Heritage Site. But this critically important landscape has had a tragic past and is often referred to as ground zero in the elephant poaching wars in Africa.

Once home to 22,000 elephants in the 1970s, militarised poachers reduced the population to fewer than 1,200 today; and the northern white rhinos were poached to local extinction in the early 2000s. During three decades from the 1980s to 2000s, Garamba was overrun with rebel forces and heavily militarised poachers, leaving human and environmental devastation in their wake.