Women in wildlife trafficking in Africa: A synthesis of literature

Wildlife trafficking is an illegal industry that some estimate is worth $5–23 billion USD annually; it occurs in over 120 countries around the world and involves multiple taxa of species, including mammals, corals, reptiles, bony fishes and birds. Across source, transit and destination geographies of wildlife trafficking networks, wildlife trafficking harms people, wildlife and ecosystems. African countries, their wildlife and their people feature significantly across all these trafficking spaces. Amongst the corpus of literature on wildlife trafficking in Africa, the role of women is rarely explored. Women comprise approximately half of the earth’s population and thus have the potential to be at least half of the problem causing, and solutions resolving, wildlife trafficking risks. The role of African women in wildlife trafficking remains mostly unknown and under addressed by conservation science and policy. We synthesized the existing literature on roles of women in wildlife trafficking published between 2010 and 2019, creating a novel gender-integrated conceptual framework to guide our synthesis. Our conceptual framework for women in wildlife trafficking includes six primary and 31 secondary roles. Beyond using the conceptual framework for profiling trends and gaps in the literature, we consider how and where the roles of women in wildlife trafficking could be mainstreamed by conservation biologists, criminologists and other stakeholders. Efforts to overcome challenges to combatting wildlife trafficking will likely benefit from increased attention to, and mainstreaming of, the role of women in wildlife trafficking. Such efforts will require evidence upon which to anchor and goalposts upon which to aim; without attending to the roles of women in wildlife trafficking, such evidence will not exist for conservation.