Every year Africa loses $50 billion in illicit financial flows. This represents a huge lost opportunity in funds for economic investment in jobs, poverty, inequality and climate change. It then becomes imperative to detect, trace and recover this money. At least a third of these illegal financial flows (IFFs) are attributed to the trade of wildlife species perpetrated by criminal syndicates. Wildlife crime is now considered a lucrative black-market trade on a par with drugs, arms and human trafficking in scope and profit. These criminal syndicates rely on a system of weak controls and governance systems to perpetrate wildlife crime in…
