Manda is the opposite of Zakouma: a national park almost nobody talks about, with no camps, no rates and no visitors, covering 1.140 square kilometres of savannah and gallery forest right beside the Chari River and the city of Sarh. Since December 2025 it has also been one of the most interesting restoration projects in Central Africa.
Its story is one of loss. The park was created to protect the Derby eland, the largest antelope in the world, and the elephants of Moyen-Chari. Both species disappeared from Manda in the late 1980s, wiped out by poaching and the chaos of Chad's civil wars. What remained was a protected area on paper: no budget, no effective rangers, tracks overgrown with vegetation, and growing pressure from farming, grazing and illegal fishing.
What also remained, however, was life: roan antelope, waterbuck, buffalo, hippos, crocodiles, leopards, wild dogs and more than 150 recorded bird species, which earned it designation as an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International. And an ecological role that reaches beyond its borders: Manda serves as a transit corridor for elephants and giraffes. In December 2025 the Government of Chad handed its management for ten years to the French NGO Noé, backed by the African Parks incubator programme, the European Union and the French Development Agency. Since 2026 the park has been reopening. This guide covers what is there, with the honest warning that it is still a destination for very self-sufficient and very patient travellers.
Manda National Park was created in southern Chad to protect the Derby eland, or giant eland, the largest antelope in the world: according to Wikipedia it has been a wildlife reserve since 1953 and a national park since 1969, while the managing NGO Noé and other sources date its creation to 1965. It covers 1.140 km² between the Chari River, which bounds it to the east, and the Sarh–N'Djamena road to the southwest. The species it was created for disappeared from the park in the late 1980s, as did the African elephant, victims of poaching and the institutional collapse caused by Chad's civil wars. For decades Manda existed more on paper than on the ground. On 10 December 2025 the Chadian government signed a ten-year management agreement with the French NGO Noé, backed by the African Parks incubator programme, the European Union and the French Development Agency, to reopen ranger posts, restore infrastructure, restore security in the area and restart ecological monitoring from 2026.
Read the full history ↓The Chad of rains, cotton and oil, and of the elephant that came back: Zakouma, the Manda savanna and the last manatees of Léré.
Read the history of The green south and the great parks →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Manda National Park covers 1,140 square kilometres —more than 113,000 hectares— in Chad's Moyen-Chari province, right on the doorstep of the city of Sarh. Its boundaries are easy to describe: the Chari River to the east and the Sarh–N'Djamena road to the southwest. It is listed as IUCN Category II.
The landscape belongs to the Sudanian zone, not the Sahel. Wooded savanna, tall grasslands, gallery forests along the watercourses and a generous rainy season that, in this strip of southern Chad, comfortably exceeds a thousand millimetres a year. This is green Chad, the Chad that grows cotton, cassava, peanuts and sugar cane, and that supports an animal biomass very different from that of the thorny plains of the north.
The Chari is the key to the whole system. The great river, which rises in the Central African Republic and flows into Lake Chad, marks the park's eastern edge and brings permanent water, hippos, crocodiles, fish and abundant waterbirds. The gallery forests that line it are a habitat of very high value and, at the same time, the place where human pressure is greatest: fishing, riverside farming, livestock.
That mix of savanna, river and gallery forest explains the park's species list: roan antelope, waterbuck, buffalo, hippo, crocodile, leopard, African wild dog, otter, monitor lizard, and more than 150 recorded bird species. Manda is also a transit corridor for elephants and giraffes moving through southern Chad, which gives it a connectivity value that goes beyond its own boundaries.
Manda was born with a very specific goal: to protect the Derby eland, also called the giant eland, the largest antelope in the world. An animal of up to a thousand kilos, with spiral horns and a band of white stripes on its flanks, that lives in the wooded savannas of the Sudanian belt and that was already retreating across its whole range in the 20th century.
The sources do not agree on the dates, and it is worth saying so plainly. Wikipedia records the area as a wildlife reserve from 1953 and as a national park from 1969. The NGO Noé —now the park's manager— and several reference sources give 1965 as the year it was created. What all of them do agree on is the area, 1,140 square kilometres, and the founding purpose: the Derby eland.
At the outset, Manda was part of a wider effort. The 1960s were the decade in which Chad's protected-area system was created: Zakouma was declared a national park by presidential decree on 7 May 1963, the first in the country, and other reserves in the south and centre followed in the years after. Newly independent Chad was giving itself a conservation network, at least on paper.
The problem is that this network was built just before the country entered its longest cycle of violence. FROLINAT was founded in 1966 and the first Chadian civil war began; it was followed by the overthrow of Tombalbaye in 1975, the factional war, the Libyan intervention, the regime of Hissène Habré and the arrival of Idriss Déby in 1990. For almost three decades, a national park in the deep south was the last item on any government's list of priorities.
In the late 1980s, the event that defines Manda's history took place: the Derby eland disappeared from the park. The species the protected area had been created to protect became locally extinct. And it was not the only one: the African elephant met the same fate in the same period.
The causes were the usual ones in those circumstances. The spread of automatic weapons during the civil wars, commercial poaching —for ivory in the case of the elephant, for meat in the case of the eland—, the complete absence of effective patrols and the advance of farming and grazing into the park. A protected area with no budget, no working rangers and no state control is, in practice, a line on a map.
What followed were decades of existence in name only. The tracks were swallowed by vegetation, the ranger posts were abandoned, illegal fishing took hold on the Chari and herds moved in without restriction. And yet the park did not die completely: roan antelope, waterbuck, buffalo, the river's hippos and crocodiles, and leopards all survived, along with a bird community rich enough for BirdLife International to designate it an Important Bird Area. Species listed for the site include the Yellow Penduline Tit, Senegal Eremomela, Blackcap Babbler, White-collared Starling, Bush Petronia, Rufous Cisticola, Gambaga Flycatcher and Red-faced Pytilia.
That biological resilience is what meant that, thirty-five years later, it still made sense to try to bring it back.
On 10 December 2025, the Government of Chad and the French NGO Noé signed a ten-year management agreement for Manda National Park. The stated aim is to preserve and restore biodiversity across the park's 1,140 square kilometres.
The arrangement is interesting for the way it is put together. Noé did not arrive alone: the project is backed by the African Parks incubator programme —the same organisation that manages Zakouma and Ennedi—, by the European Union and by the French Development Agency, support designed to allow a rapid deployment and to build operational capacity from scratch. In practice, it exports the delegated-management model that worked in Zakouma to a park in far worse shape.
Noé was not new to Chad either. Since 2019 it has managed the Binder-Léré Wildlife Reserve, in the southwest of the country, and since 2021 the associated complex of protected areas, where, according to the organisation itself, elephant poaching stopped and forest cover regenerated. That track record weighed in Chad's decision.
The work plan, which got under way in 2026, is the classic restoration playbook: reopen the ranger posts, restore infrastructure, regain security control of the area, set up ecological monitoring, step up work with neighbouring communities, identify priority areas for restoration and tackle the two most serious pressures, illegal fishing and unregulated grazing. The threats identified are the same ones that brought the park to the brink of collapse: habitat loss from agricultural expansion, livestock, poaching, illegal fishing and unsustainable use of the river.
For travellers, Manda's situation in 2026 needs to be stated without embellishment: it is not an established tourist destination. There is no accommodation inside the park, no published and verifiable admission fees, no regular circuits, and the internal tracks are only just being reopened. Any visit today requires checking in advance with the park administration, with Noé or with a local agency in Sarh, and arriving with your own 4x4, guide, water, food and fuel.
What it does offer is a kind of experience that is becoming rare: an African park with no visitors, with real wildlife, less than an hour from a city of more than a hundred thousand people, and at the exact moment it is starting to recover. For birdwatchers —more than 150 recorded species and IBA status— it is already an interesting destination. For travellers interested in conservation, it is a chance to see a project at its start rather than its result.
The comparison with Zakouma is inevitable and instructive. Zakouma was also on the brink of collapse: it lost 90% of its elephants between 2002 and 2010 and today, fifteen years after African Parks arrived, it has around 800, more than 1,300 Kordofan giraffes, buffalo herds of more than 13,000 animals and a tourist season with published rates. If recent Chadian history proves anything, it is that recovering a devastated protected area is possible, even if it takes more than a decade and requires sustained outside funding.
The Derby eland, the largest antelope in the world and Manda's original reason for being, has still not returned. If it ever does, the park will have come full circle.
