An hour from Niamey, on the Dosso road, there is a plateau of striped scrubland and millet fields where the last wild giraffes of West Africa roam. There are no fences, no national park gate, no lodges: the giraffes live alongside the villages, feed on the acacias lining the fields and cross the road whenever they feel like it. It is one of the most unlikely and most moving conservation stories on the continent.
The peralta giraffe, endemic to the region, was down to 49 individuals in the mid-1990s: practically extinct. Today the population is counted in the hundreds —Niger's official 2023 census spoke of 1.148 animals— thanks to a conservation model that did not fence the animals in but worked with the people who live among them, through the Association pour la Sauvegarde des Girafes du Niger and a corps of local guides who make their living from ecotourism.
And the other side has to be told too. On 9 August 2020, Kouré was the scene of the killing of six French aid workers and their Nigerien driver and guide, in an attack claimed by Islamic State. It lies in Tillabéry, the hardest-hit region in the country. The reserve is still alive and receives organised visits, but any trip here requires permits, an authorised guide and whatever security arrangements the authorities decide on. This guide describes what Kouré is, with that warning up front.
A century ago the West African giraffe ranged across an unbroken belt from Senegal to Lake Chad. Hunting, habitat loss and the great Sahel droughts wiped it out country by country until, by the mid-1990s, it was down to 49 individuals concentrated on a plateau south-east of Niamey. Their survival there was no accident: no lions or hyenas were left in the area to prey on them, and the local population never hunted them systematically. From 1996 the Nigerien state, with international support and with the Association pour la Sauvegarde des Girafes du Niger founded in 2001, set up a community conservation scheme —local guides, microcredit, wells, tree nurseries— that bet on making giraffes worth having for the locals. It worked: the population grew more than tenfold and the IUCN downgraded the subspecies from Endangered to Vulnerable in 2018. Between 2018 and 2022, Operation Sahel Giraffe moved twelve animals more than 800 kilometres, under military protection, to the Gadabedji Biosphere Reserve to create a second population.
Read the full history ↓The country's fertile strip: the capital that grew up beside the river, the Zarma lands of Dosso and the last wild giraffes of West Africa, at Kouré.
Read the history of Niamey and the Niger River (south-west) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The West African giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis peralta, is one of the nine recognised subspecies of giraffe and the most genetically isolated of them all. You can tell it apart at a glance by its lighter-toned patches —a pale ochre instead of the deep chestnut of its eastern and southern relatives— with blurred edges that give it an almost faded look, and by a softer ochre on its legs.
Just a century ago its range traced a continuous belt across the Sahel, from Senegal and Mauritania to Lake Chad, through Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria. It was the giraffe of the Sahel, the great mammal of the acacia landscapes that separate the Sahara from the savannah.
That belt was gradually erased over the 20th century. Hunting —for meat, for skins, for colonial sport—, the spread of farmland, the felling of acacias for firewood and fodder and, above all, the great Sahelian droughts of 1968-1974 and 1983-1985 wiped out population after population. By the 1980s the subspecies had already vanished from almost every country where it once lived.
By the mid-1990s there were 49 left. Forty-nine giraffes in the whole world, concentrated on a scrubland plateau southeast of Niamey. Nobody would have bet on their future.
The survival of the giraffes on this particular plateau wasn't a plan: it was the result of a series of circumstances that lined up in their favour.
The first is ecological. The large predators disappeared from the Kouré area decades ago. There are no lions or spotted hyenas left, and without predation the mortality of calves —the bottleneck for any giraffe population— drops sharply. The Kouré giraffes are, in fact, the only large wild mammals left in the whole area.
The second is cultural. The people of the plateau, mostly Zarma, farmers and Muslim, never hunted giraffes systematically. Living side by side wasn't always idyllic —the giraffes eat from orchard trees, break fences, trample crops— but it never turned into persecution.
The third is the landscape. The plateau is covered in brousse tigrée, an ecosystem of alternating bands of dense scrub and bare ground that, seen from the air, draws a tiger-stripe pattern and works as a natural machine for capturing the scarce rain. Those strips of acacias and combretaceae are the giraffes' feeding ground in the dry season; in the wet season the animals move down towards the river valley, where they find a different kind of forage. That seasonal back-and-forth between plateau and valley is what shapes the life of the population.
A sense of scale: an adult eats about 30 kilos of leaves a day, mostly acacia, and the largest males reach 5,80 metres in height.
From 1996, when it became clear that the subspecies was on the brink of extinction, the Nigerien state and its international partners made a decision that was unorthodox at the time: rather than creating a fenced park or moving the animals, they bet on coexistence. That was how the National Giraffe Nature Reserve (RNNG) was born, a protected area with no fences where the giraffes still walk among millet fields and villages.
The reasoning was simple and risky: if the giraffes were going to live among people, the only way to save them was to make having them worthwhile for those people. In 2001 the Association for the Safeguarding of the Giraffes of Niger (ASGN) was founded, and since then it has worked in six communes in the area —Harikanassou, Kouré, N'Gonga, Kiota, Dantchandou and Tondikandia— with a package of measures that has little to do with a zoo and a lot to do with rural development: acacia nurseries, cereal banks, microcredit for women's groups, wells, environmental education and, above all, training a corps of local guides who make a living from ecotourism.
That corps of guides is the keystone of the system. The guides are local residents; they track the animals every day, recognise individuals by the pattern of their patches and charge a fee that goes to the association. Every visitor who comes to Kouré pays a ministry fee and a contribution to the guides' association, and that money goes back to the community.
The numbers proved the experiment right. From 49 individuals in the mid-1990s the population grew to around 175 in 2007, 310 in 2011 and between 400 and 450 by 2016. Niger's official 2023 census reported 1.148 animals —the Giraffe Conservation Foundation used a more conservative estimate, «more than 600»—. In 2018 the International Union for Conservation of Nature downgraded the subspecies from Endangered to Vulnerable. It is one of the few recovery stories of a large African mammal in recent decades.
A population concentrated in a single place is a fragile population: an epidemic, an extreme drought or a sudden change in land use could wipe it out in one blow. That's why the next stage in conserving the peralta giraffe was to create a second population, far from Kouré.
The chosen site was the Gadabedji Biosphere Reserve, in the Maradi region, an area where the subspecies had disappeared decades earlier. The operation, named Sahel Giraffe, was coordinated by the Giraffe Conservation Foundation together with the government of Niger, Sahara Conservation and Wild Africa Conservation.
In 2018 eight giraffes were captured and moved; in a second mission, in 2022, four females joined them. In total, twelve animals travelled more than 800 kilometres by road, in specially fitted lorries and under military protection, in a country where the route crosses high-risk areas. Moving a live giraffe is a delicate veterinary operation anywhere in the world; doing it across the Sahel, with an armed escort, is a whole other level of challenge.
The goal was met: for the first time there is a satellite population of West African giraffe, which widens its range and reduces the risk of a single event wiping out the subspecies.
Until 2020, the giraffe area was the favourite weekend trip for Niamey's expat community and practically Niger's only established tourist product. It was an hour from the capital, on paved road, and offered something that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.
On Sunday 9 August 2020, a group of armed men on motorbikes intercepted a vehicle inside the area. They killed eight people: six French aid workers from the organisations ACTED, based in Paris, and IMPACT Initiatives, based in Geneva, and their two Nigerien companions, the driver and the guide. The attackers killed the guide and the driver first.
The French anti-terrorism prosecutor's office opened an investigation and described it as a premeditated attack on Westerners. In September 2020, the Islamic State claimed responsibility through its regional affiliate, describing it as a lightning raid in the Kouré area. In December 2021, France announced it had killed a suspect in the attack.
The effect was immediate and lasting. Kouré disappeared from international itineraries, and the Tillabéri region, where it lies, came to be described by Western foreign ministries as territory under the control of armed groups. The coup of July 2023 and the subsequent decline in security completed the picture: today the US State Department keeps Niger at Level 4, «Do Not Travel», and the Nigerien authorities require a military escort for any foreigner leaving Niamey.
The paradox of Kouré is that conservation works while the international tourism that funded it has evaporated. The giraffes are still there, the guides' association is still working and the Nigerien state is still counting them: the 2023 census gave 1.148 animals, the highest figure ever recorded for the subspecies.
Tourism, on the other hand, has changed in nature. International groups no longer come; instead there are domestic excursions and official visits. The opening of the 2025 tourist season was held on 5 April in Boubon, together with the launch of the sixth edition of the Niger River Civilisations Festival «Alzanayé», and on Sunday 6 April a delegation of ministers and diplomats accredited to Niger, led by the Minister of Tourism and the governor of Tillabéri, travelled to Kouré to see the giraffes. In July 2025, around thirty students from the war colleges of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali made a study visit to the reserve. On 20 June 2026, Niger's Tourism Promotion Agency organised another excursion to mark World Giraffe Day, held every 21 June.
That domestic and official tourism keeps the activity alive, but it doesn't replace the income generated by international visitors, who were the ones sustaining the guides' livelihoods and much of the community incentive. The open question, in Kouré as across Niger, is how long a conservation model built on ecotourism can last when the tourism disappears.
Meanwhile, the peralta giraffe keeps walking among the millet fields, eating acacias and crossing the RN1 whenever it feels like it, in the only place on the planet where it still can.
