Colchester Zoological Society gave 10,000 pounds to Zambia’s elephant orphanage in 2024, and it published what the money did. Some of it paid a keeper called Aaron.
That level of disclosure is rare enough to be worth writing about on its own.
“In 2024, Colchester Zoological Society gave a contribution of £10,000 to help provide food and medical treatment for the orphans and to support the wage of one of the elephant caregivers, Aaron, who has worked at the project since 2012.”
Colchester Zoological Society
It gave 10,000 pounds again in 2025, and it has supported Game Rangers International’s Elephant Orphanage Project since 2010.
“My interest in saving animals started with a one month old orphan elephant called Zambezi, I had to look after him 24/7 and it was the best times I’ve ever had in my life.”
Aaron Gumbo, elephant keeper
What the money is attached to
GRI runs a two-stage pipeline. Orphaned elephants come into the Lusaka Elephant Nursery, inside Lusaka National Park, and graduate roughly 400km to the Kafue Release Facility, where they rejoin wild herds on their own timetable. The project was established in 2008 with funding from the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation.
The results take a very long time to arrive. Muchichili came in at eighteen months old in 2016 and walked off with wild elephants in 2023. Chamilandu, the eldest released female, gave birth in the wild near Nkala Pools in November 2025, her second calf and the first delivered with no human involvement at all.
Seven years from rescue to independence is normal for this species. It is longer than most grant cycles and longer than most zoo partnerships last.
The honest limits of this one
Colchester is the only accredited zoo we could verify as a GRI funder. GRI’s supporters page names 25 organizations and Colchester is the sole zoological institution among them. We downloaded GRI’s 2024 impact report and searched it: the only instance of the string “zoo” in 24 pages is the word “zoonoses.”
So this is not a case of the zoo sector carrying a program. It is one BIAZA member, sustaining a line item in another country for fifteen years, and being specific in public about which line item.
That specificity is the useful part. Institutional conservation giving is usually reported as a total. A named keeper’s wage, disclosed by the funder, is a different kind of claim and a checkable one.
Sources: Colchester Zoological Society; Game Rangers International.
