Two years after cheetahs were first reintroduced to Liwonde National Park, another four individuals have been safely translocated from South Africa to the Majete Wildlife Reserve.

They will form a crucial founder population and help grow the range of the vulnerable big cat.

Cheetahs were entirely absent from Malawi for twenty years before a successful reintroduction returned them to Liwonde National Park in 2017.

The translocation of these four cheetahs was a collaboration between African Parks, which manages Majete and Liwonde, Malawi's Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) and the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT).

Eradicated from 90 percent of their historic range in Africa, cheetahs are listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN, and as few as 6,700 remain in the wild.

While numbers have plummeted due to shrinking habitats and growing anthropogenic pressures, protected areas provide safe spaces that are critical to enabling population growth and range expansion, and to securing a future for the species on the continent.

African Parks

African Parks is a non-profit organisation that manages 15 national parks and protected areas in nine countries covering over 10.5 million hectares in Benin, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda and Zambia.

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