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Adams Casinga

Founding Director, Conserv Congo

At 38 years of age, Adams is a wildlife activist, a wildlife criminal investigator, a civic leader, a writer and a public speaker from the Democratic Republic of Congo. After running a successful mining consultancy business for seven years, he decided to dedicate his career to protecting the Congolese biodiversity.

Adams is currently the founder and CEO for Conserv Congo, a nature conservation-aligned NGO which fights poaching/wildlife trafficking, through the application and enforcement of environmental laws, and environmental conservation through education. He and his team of volunteer activists fight the illegal wildlife trafficking in the region by infiltrating gangs and networks of traffickers; organise sting operations to make arrests in conjunction with the authorities; and, then make sure that justice takes place and there is no corruption in the cases. Adams’s efforts include empowering park rangers, investigating local and International wildlife criminals and their trends; creating the first nondiscriminatory monkey sanctuary; initiating community subsistence farming projects to curb poaching and ensure food security.

Adams is a former investigative reporter with the South African media. He was shot three times while investigating a story in 2006 and was a recipient of the Caxton’s “No guts, no story” award for showing courage in the face of danger. He is an alumnus of Young African Leaders Initiative and a finalist for the Community Solutions program in 2017. That same year he was selected for the Mandela Washington Fellowship, funded by the U.S. State Department. One of the flagship projects of former president Obama.

He has a diploma in journalism from Rhodes University, a qualification in environmental management from the National Occupational Institute of Southern Africa (NOSA) and has further studied project management. He is fluent in French, English, Portuguese as well as 12 African languages, including Swahili and Zulu. He is working on establishing a non-discriminatory sanctuary for primates in Kinshasa as of next year.