Gabon is one of the places on Earth where forests still outpace people. Nearly 90% of the country is covered in dense tropical rainforest, part of the vast Congo Basin that helps regulate rainfall across the continent. Its forests, rivers and 500 miles of Atlantic coastline are home to more than half the world’s remaining forest elephants and a quarter of its lowland gorillas. They also absorb more carbon than the country emits.
Now Gabon is trying something new to keep it that way — and to make sure the people living alongside that wildlife share in the benefits.
On August 29, the Government of Gabon, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the conservation coalition Enduring Earth formally launched Gabon Infini, an initiative designed to mobilize up to $200 million over the next decade for conservation and community development. It’s structured as a Project Finance for Permanence (PFP) — a financing model that bundles government commitments, philanthropic funding and a long-term implementation plan into a single package, rather than relying on scattered, short-term grants.
Ademola Ajagbe, TNC’s Regional Managing Director for Africa, says that’s the point. “Rather than relying on a series of short-term projects, it brings together financing, government commitments and partners around shared outcomes for communities and nature,” he explains. Over ten years, the plan is to support sustainable livelihoods, strengthen protected-area management, ease human-wildlife conflict, and build climate resilience — while also setting up financing mechanisms that can outlast the initiative itself.
What the money will actually do
The numbers behind Gabon Infini are ambitious: 3.7 million hectares of new protected land, on top of improved management across roughly 3.8 million hectares already protected, plus key freshwater and marine ecosystems. Those targets aren’t arbitrary — they come from Gabon’s own national Community Development and Conservation Plan, which underpins the country’s “30x30x30” pledge to protect 30% of its land, freshwater and ocean territory by 2030.
Ajagbe notes that “improved management” isn’t just a line on a map. It means protected areas actually having “the financing, institutions and practical management needed to deliver effective conservation outcomes” — rangers, monitoring systems, and functioning local governance, not just designated boundaries.
Where communities come in
The government has called Gabon Infini a “community-first” initiative, and the design reflects that. The plan is expected to directly benefit up to 100,000 people living in and around these landscapes through investment in the structures communities already rely on. That means strengthening community-based organizations, backing sustainable forestry and fishing cooperatives, and expanding local participation in how these landscapes are actually managed.
It also means funding practical, on-the-ground programs: initiatives that help farmers and elephants coexist rather than clash, and support for communities adapting to climate impacts like coastal erosion and inland flooding.
For Ajagbe, this isn’t a side benefit bolted onto a conservation plan — it’s the logic the whole initiative is built on. “The principle is simple,” he says. “Lasting conservation depends on communities benefiting alongside nature.” In other words, protected areas that ignore the economic needs of the people living in them tend not to stay protected for long; Gabon Infini is betting that durability comes from making conservation pay for the communities closest to it, not just for the ecosystem itself.
Who’s paying, and how it’s managed
Funding will come from a mix of donors, including the Bezos Earth Fund, the Global Environment Facility, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, among others. Rather than routing the money through government directly, it will be managed by an independent trust — le Fonds de Préservation de la Biodiversité au Gabon (FPBG) — a structure its CEO, Christine Yasmine Tchoua, has called “unique in Central Africa.”
Gabon Infini builds on a smaller, ocean-focused $163 million project TNC helped facilitate in 2023. Ajagbe describes the two as complementary rather than sequential: “Nature Bonds focuses on ocean conservation, while Gabon Infini supports terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems and places community development at its core.” The throughline between them, he says, is a lesson learned across conservation finance more broadly — that durable results need more than an initial injection of cash. They need long-term financing, strong institutions, and clear objectives.
A model for the rest of Africa?
Gabon Infini is the ninth PFP that Enduring Earth — a coalition founded by TNC, WWF, The Pew Charitable Trusts and ZOMA LAB — has helped bring to life globally, and the first in Central Africa. Similar deals are underway in Namibia, Brazil and Kenya.
Asked whether Gabon’s approach could be replicated elsewhere on the continent, Ajagbe is measured. “Every country has its own priorities and circumstances,” he says. “The value of Gabon Infini is not that it can be replicated exactly elsewhere, but that it demonstrates what a country-led, long-term approach can achieve.”
That caution is warranted. Gabon remains economically reliant on oil, and the Congo Basin has historically drawn far less international funding and attention than the Amazon. Ajagbe argues those pressures make the case for durable financing stronger, not weaker: “Gabon Infini is designed not only to mobilise funding over ten years, but also to help establish sustainable financing mechanisms that can support conservation and communities well beyond that period.”
Whether Gabon Infini becomes a template other African nations can adapt — or a one-off shaped by Gabon’s particular mix of forest wealth and political will — will likely become clearer over the next few years, as the first tranches of funding move from pledge to practice.
