15 In 2011, rangers walking the floodplains of southeastern Chad counted exactly one elephant calf under the age of three. National Geographic reports that nine years earlier, more than 4,000 elephants had moved through the same grassland; by 2010, organised poaching gangs operating out of Sudan and northern Chad had killed roughly nine in every ten of them, leaving barely 400 survivors too traumatised to breed. That single calf explains why anyone writes about Zakouma National Park’s elephant recovery today. It also explains why the park now sits at the centre of one of the least publicised conservation turnarounds on the continent, inside a country most travel brands have never mapped. How Rangers Drove Zakouma National Park’s Elephant Recovery According to an African Parks 2025 report, the people who carried Zakouma back from the edge were not global conservation celebrities. They were Chadian rangers recruited from villages around the park, a rapid-response unit known as the Mambas, and a government in N’Djamena willing to hand full management control of its oldest national park to an outside partner. In 2010, the Government of Chad signed a long-term agreement with African Parks, a nonprofit that now manages 24 protected areas across 13 countries. According to Wild Frontiers, the ranger force overhauled patrols, built an aerial surveillance capability, and worked with communities whose grazing routes crossed the park boundary rather than against them. African Parks also opened Elephant Schools around Zakouma, extending education access to more than 1,500 children in surrounding villages, an investment designed to give the next generation a stake in the park’s survival rather than a reason to poach it. The results are measurable. Zakouma’s elephant population has grown by roughly 40% since 2010, with more than 550 individuals now recorded, up from around 450 at the partnership’s start. In 2017, rangers counted 81 calves under the age of three, against the single calf recorded in 2011, physical proof that a species breeds again once the killing stops. Only 24 elephants are confirmed to have been lost to poaching in the fourteen years since African Parks took over, a fraction of the losses recorded in a single bad season before 2010. Buffalo have followed a similar trajectory, climbing from around 200 animals in 1986 to more than 10,000 by 2016, and Zakouma today holds roughly half of the entire world’s population of Kordofan giraffe. In May 2018, the recovery reached a symbolic milestone: six black rhinos, flown more than 3,000 miles from South Africa’s Eastern Cape under a memorandum signed between Chad and South Africa in October 2017, became the first of their species to set foot in the country in nearly fifty years. “Their reintroduction signifies an important advancement in the restoration of the park,” said Sagour Youssouf Mahamat Itno, Chad’s then-Ambassador to South Africa, in May 2018. Zakouma National Park’s Elephant Recovery Has Not Reached Its Tourists Despite the recovery, Zakouma remains one of the emptiest wildlife destinations on the continent, measured in visitor numbers rather than animal counts. More than 6,300 people visited the park in 2025, a record for Zakouma but a figure that a single mid-sized lodge in the Maasai Mara might see within a few weeks. Chad’s entire tourism sector remains tiny by comparison with its neighbours: the World Bank recorded only 10,400 international tourist arrivals into the whole country in 2020, the most recent year with published figures. Part of the reason is straightforward. Zakouma sits roughly 800 kilometres from the capital, N’Djamena, a drive of twelve to eighteen hours depending on the season, or a private charter flight of around two hours that most visitors choose instead. Charter flights typically add $500 to $660 per person return, on top of full-board lodge rates of roughly $200 to $250 a night at Tinga Camp, or considerably more at the smaller, mobile Camp Nomade. The other part of the reason is less comfortable to state. Chad carries some of the most cautious travel advisories issued by any Western government for a country with an operating national park: the United States State Department maintains a Level 3, “reconsider travel” advisory, last updated in June 2025, and Australia’s government advises against all travel to the country. In May 2025, a light aircraft on a routine rhino-monitoring flight crashed near the park boundary, killing the South African pilot and a Chadian environment ministry official on board, a reminder that conservation work here still carries real operational risk. Months later, an investigation published by The Continent reported internal staff complaints alleging pressure on pilots and unresolved questions over ivory stock records at Zakouma; African Parks has stated there is no discrepancy in its ivory records. Whichever account proves correct, the episode underlines that Zakouma’s next challenge is institutional trust, not wildlife numbers. ALSO READ: Somalia’s Coastline: The Tourism Case No One Is Making Yet ECOWAS Single Currency Delays and What They Mean for Cross-Border Travel Sierra Leone and Liberia: The Next West African Coastlines Investors Are Watching THE RCA POSITION What Zakouma National Park Needs to Reach the Global Stage Closing the distance between Zakouma’s conservation results and its tourism profile requires more than a better marketing campaign. The Visa News 2024 report finds that air access is the clearest constraint. Chad’s government expanded its electronic visa system in December 2024, and from 11 May 2026 made online application mandatory for all foreign visitors, a genuine simplification for travellers who previously had to apply through embassies. A multiple-entry, 90-day tourist eVisa currently costs €100, a manageable price by regional standards. What has not changed is the scarcity of scheduled flights into N’Djamena itself and the near-total absence of connecting charter capacity to Zakouma outside a handful of tour operators. Chad also needs to resolve a transparency problem that predates its safety concerns. A park asking international visitors to trust its conservation numbers has to be equally open when internal governance questions surface, as they did around Zakouma in 2025. Independent verification of ranger welfare, aircraft safety protocols, and ivory accounting would reassure sceptical travellers more effectively than any new advertising spend. Community ownership needs deepening too: the Elephant Schools model shows what shared benefit looks like, but the same approach has to extend to guiding jobs, procurement, and tourism revenue reaching villages beyond the park boundary, not only inside it. Chad also needs regional positioning rather than isolated promotion. Zakouma will never compete with the Serengeti on volume, and it should not try to. Its argument is scarcity and density: a herd of more than 550 elephants, ten thousand buffalo, half the world’s Kordofan giraffe, and reintroduced black rhino, viewed without another vehicle in sight for days at a time. That case needs to be made consistently, through African Union tourism forums, joint marketing with Rwanda and other African Parks-managed destinations, and direct outreach to the specialist operators who already sell Chad, rather than broad campaigns aimed at a mass safari market Zakouma cannot yet physically absorb. Chad has demonstrated something few African governments have managed at comparable scale: that a wildlife population reduced to near collapse can be rebuilt within a single decade through disciplined law enforcement and sustained community partnership. What Chad has not yet demonstrated is the ability to convert that recovery into the tourism revenue, regional profile, and traveller familiarity that Kenya, Botswana, and South Africa built over decades, and closing that gap, not the conservation work itself, is now the harder task. Getting to Zakouma National Park: A Traveller’s Guide by Region The park rewards travellers who plan around its dry season, from December to May, when wildlife concentrates around the Salamat River’s remaining waterholes and predator sightings become more reliable. Every route into the park still runs through N’Djamena, so the traveller’s regional starting point matters more than it would for a better-connected safari destination. Nigerian and West African travellers: Chad sits outside the ECOWAS bloc, so visa-free entry does not apply. Apply for Chad’s e-visa online before departure. The most workable routing connects through Douala or Addis Ababa onto N’Djamena, followed by a charter flight or an arranged 4×4 transfer into Zakouma. European travellers: Paris and Addis Ababa offer the most direct connections into N’Djamena. The 90-day multiple-entry eVisa suits travellers combining Zakouma with a wider Central African itinerary. North American travellers: expect at least one long-haul connection through Paris, Istanbul, or Addis Ababa before reaching N’Djamena. Given the total journey time already invested, a private charter into Zakouma is worth the added cost over an eighteen-hour road transfer. Travellers from elsewhere in Africa: Ethiopian Airlines’ Addis Ababa hub remains the continent’s most reliable link into N’Djamena, making Zakouma a realistic add-on to an existing East or Southern African itinerary rather than a stand-alone trip. Zakouma’s elephants did not need a marketing campaign to start breeding again; they needed the killing to stop. Chad’s tourism industry now faces the harder half of that equation: proving to a global travel market conditioned to associate safari with Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa that Central Africa has already done the difficult part. The question worth returning to is not whether Zakouma’s wildlife has recovered; the numbers answer that. It is whether Chad, and the operators who already work there, can build the access, transparency, and regional partnerships fast enough before the next country with a comparable recovery story claims the position Chad has earned but not yet occupied. Impact on Africa’s and Nigeria’s Tourism Sector Zakouma’s trajectory offers a data point the rest of the continent can use directly. Wildlife tourism remains concentrated in five countries ( Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Botswana, and Rwanda) while dozens of parks with comparable ecological value receive a fraction of the visibility. If Chad converts its elephant recovery into a credible, safety-verified circuit, it strengthens the case that Central African conservation gains can be monetised without waiting for East or Southern African-style infrastructure first. That matters for regional air connectivity, and for how African Union tourism bodies allocate promotional budgets between established and emerging wildlife markets. For Nigeria specifically, Zakouma sits within striking distance geographically but almost entirely outside the average Nigerian traveller’s safari imagination, which still defaults to Kenya or South Africa. A credible Chad safari circuit, reachable via Douala or Addis Ababa rather than a European hub, gives Nigerian outbound tour operators a genuine West and Central African alternative to sell, and gives Nigeria’s own conservation and tourism authorities a nearby case study in what a fifteen-year turnaround looks like when law enforcement, community investment, and international partnership are treated as tourism infrastructure rather than an afterthought. Chad is not the only Central African recovery story worth your attention. Read our related coverage on the continent’s overlooked conservation frontiers, and follow Rex Clarke Adventures for the destinations East and Southern Africa’s safari establishment would rather you not compare them to. FAQs Is Zakouma National Park safe to visit? Zakouma itself maintains dedicated ranger security and has recorded no major poaching-related visitor incidents. Still, Chad carries cautious government travel advisories, and access typically requires a private charter or an organised overland transfer rather than independent travel. When is the best time to visit Zakouma National Park? The dry season, from December to May, offers the most reliable wildlife viewing, with animals concentrating around remaining water sources between February and April. How do I get to Zakouma National Park? Every route starts in N’Djamena. From there, visitors take a roughly two-hour private charter flight or a twelve- to eighteen-hour overland transfer, depending on season and road conditions. Do I need a visa to visit Chad for a Zakouma safari? Yes. Most foreign nationals require Chad’s eVisa, applied for online, with a multiple-entry 90-day tourist visa currently priced at €100. What makes Zakouma’s elephant recovery significant compared with other African conservation stories? Zakouma rebuilt an elephant population from roughly 400 survivors in 2010 to more than 550 today after losing about 90% of its herd to poaching between 2002 and 2010, one of the fastest documented recoveries of its kind on the continent. Chad tourismelephant conservationwildlife travelZakouma National Park 0 comment 0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinTelegramEmail Oluwafemi Kehinde Oluwafemi Kehinde is a business and technology correspondent and an integrated marketing communications enthusiast with close to a decade of experience in content and copywriting. He currently works as an SEO specialist and a content writer at Rex Clarke Adventures. Throughout his career, he has dabbled in various spheres, including stock market reportage and SaaS writing. He also works as a social media manager for several companies. He holds a bachelor's degree in mass communication and majored in public relations.