Botswana's Chobe Angels Redefine Safari Guiding as Africa's First All-Female Guide Team
The Chobe Angels, Africa's first all-female safari guide team, are based at the five-star Chobe Game Lodge inside Chobe National Park in Kasane, Botswana. The initiative traces its roots to 2008, when Chobe Game Lodge's then-general manager Johan Bruwer set out to recruit and train women for a profession that had been almost exclusively male. Following a call-out by the Botswana Wildlife Training Institute that drew 20,000 responses, the lodge's guide team was fully female by 2010. Today, the team comprises 20 women, and roughly 80 female safari guides are employed across lodges in Botswana's Okavango Delta - the majority of whom passed through the Chobe programme first.
The Angels lead both land-based game drives in open 4WD vehicles and water-based river excursions on electric boats, and have earned international recognition for their expertise, instincts and rigorous training. For guides like Malebogo Mangwegape, who has been with the lodge for 20 years, and Oriah Sekondeko, who sat her professional guide licence exam in 2013 as the only woman among 11 candidates, the programme has been professionally and economically transformative. The team's influence now extends into local communities, with the Angels regularly invited to speak at career days at a local junior high school. Their ambitions continue to grow - with specialists pursuing qualifications in birding and astronomy - and the programme recently welcomed its first male trainee.
Source: Vancouver Sun
