Yamat Lengai is the Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning, and Adaptation Officer at African People & Wildlife, where she has worked since 2016. A native of Loibor Soit ‘A’ in northern Tanzania, she leads data collection and analysis across six landscapes, measuring the outcomes of community-based conservation programs focused on coexistence between people and wildlife. Her work spans the design of survey tools, training community enumerators and wildlife coexistence officers, and managing field monitoring systems including ArcGIS Online, SMART, and mobile data platforms. Named a Conservation Nation Fellow in 2022 with support from Catmosphere, she has also been featured in WildAid’s Conservation’s Unsung Heroes series and spoken on conservation at events in Tanzania and the United States. She is a strong advocate for women’s empowerment and girls’ education.
Yamat’s fellowship work has spanned many of Tanzania’s critical wildlife landscapes, building the data infrastructure that makes community-led conservation accountable and effective. As a Catmosphere Fellow with Conservation Nation and member of African People & Wildlife’s Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning, and Adaptation team, Yamat trained enumerators and newly deployed community coexistence officers across the Greater Lake Natron, Ngorongoro, West Kilimanjaro, and Mkomazi landscapes, equipping local teams to document wildlife incidents, conduct community well-being surveys, and monitor patrol data using mobile collection tools. She organized herder education meetings in West Kilimanjaro, bringing together traditional leaders, government officials, and young community members to develop strategies for reducing livestock losses to large carnivores.
The fellowship also expanded Yamat’s professional toolkit in ways she has applied directly in the field. She completed courses in Monitoring and Evaluation at Amref International University and Geographic Information Systems at Devimpact Institute in Nairobi, deepening her ability to design and troubleshoot data systems, evaluate program performance, and use spatial analysis to guide conservation planning. She applied those skills immediately upon returning to Tanzania, refining big cat observation tracking protocols around Mikumi National Park and retraining coexistence officers on GPS data collection methods.
In 2024, she traveled to Yellowstone National Park for a fellowship exchange with Conservation Nation Fellow Taylor Rabe, where she joined the Yellowstone Wolf Project team to learn radio telemetry and bioacoustics monitoring — and shared APW’s community-centered data approach with the team in return. Running through all of it is her belief that the communities living alongside carnivores, elephants, and other wildlife should be the ones with the tools, the data, and the decision-making power to find the balance for people and nature.