Meet the Founder: The vision behind SOS ELEPHANTS

Stephanie Vergniault is the founder and Executive Director of SOS Elephants, a non-governmental organization she set up in 2007 in Chad to save the country’s last elephants, and by extension to save the last elephants in the Central African region in response to the serious poaching crisis of recent decades.
Stéphanie VERGNIAULT is s an environmental activist but also a lawyer / in international consultant. She is graduated in law and geopolitics from la Sorbonne in Paris and she is specialized in conflict prevention and peacebuilding, democratic governance, prevention of violent extremism mainly in Africa/ Sahel region working in post crisis countries for the UN and UE in most part of Africa where she traveled worldwide.
For the past few months she has been working intensively on stabilization issues in the Lake Chad basin (Niger, Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon) in an attempt to give the ex-combatants from armed groups – Jihadist in the sub-region a chance to return to civilian life in their communities.
She came to Chad for the first time in 1995 and had the chance to meet the President of Chad, with whom a relationship of trust and friendship was established on the basis of the rescue of the elephants of Chad.
During her travels all around Arica , she began to see the dire situation of the nation’s elephants and in 2007, Stephanie decided to take action and created the NGO SOS Elephants, whose mission is dedicated to the preservation of elephants and their habitats throughout various regions by employing methods in research, education, conservation and counter poaching-disciplines.

Stephanie now lives partly in Kenya and partially in Chad with her team where she has a camp surrounded by elephants and hippopotamus.
As a volunteer and president of SOS ELEPHANTS, she works closely with local communities in Chad to teach elephant conservation tactics. Stephanie has taught local farmers how to protect their crops from elephants. She has also worked tirelessly in the field with anti-poaching task forces against over-armed poachers with the Chad government.
She has also opened two environmental schools for the children of the local communities.
She is French but she has also the nationality of Chad.
One of the projects Stephanie has been working on for years is to create a protected area along the elephant corridor in the Chari River region, as elephants have nowhere else to go. She is aware of the need to save their habitat before it’s too late, and also to help local communities in the conflict between humans and elephants.