Imvelo Safari Lodges

For over 30 years, Imvelo has created exceptional safari experiences while delivering meaningful benefits to neighboring communities and supporting long-term conservation efforts.

You can explore Hwange National Park through a collection of five distinctive lodges, each designed to offer a unique atmosphere, accommodation style, and ecosystem. This carefully crafted safari circuit allows you to experience the diverse landscapes and wildlife of Zimbabwe while enjoying personalized service from experienced guides and dedicated staff who prioritize your comfort, safety, and enjoyment.

Hwange National Park is home to Africa’s largest concentration of elephants, with more than 45,000 individuals roaming the region. At every Imvelo lodge, you can enjoy remarkable elephant encounters from your private veranda, an underground hide, a mountain bike, a safari vehicle, or on guided walking safaris. Beyond elephants, you can also observe lions, endangered cheetahs, African wild dogs, and a wealth of other wildlife that flourishes across the park.

At Bomani Tented Lodge, you overlook the expansive Ngamo Plains, where herbivores graze and predators patiently wait for opportunities to hunt. Nearby, Camelthorn Lodge places you within the Imvelo Ngamo Rhino Sanctuary, surrounded by one of the last remaining untouched acacia woodlands. From the comfort of your villa, you may even watch a rhino stroll past your floor-to-ceiling windows.

In northern Hwange National Park, Nehimba Lodge introduces you to a different ecosystem dominated by mopane woodland and scrubland. During the dry season, wildlife gathers at the waterholes in front of the lodge, giving you exceptional opportunities to observe elephants and other large game as they seek water.

If you crave adventure and seclusion, Jozibanini Camp offers a truly remote safari experience in the southwestern corner of the park. Here, you stay in comfortable elevated tents and enjoy unique activities such as mountain biking, sleeping beneath the stars, and participating in conservation-focused borehole supply runs.

At Tum Tum Treehouse Lodge, Imvelo's newest property, you stay in the only dedicated treehouse accommodation within Hwange National Park. Designed with sustainability in mind, the lodge blends seamlessly into its natural surroundings while allowing you to watch wildlife pass beneath your elevated deck. You can also enjoy panoramic views from the Eagle’s Nest viewing platform connected directly to your treehouse.

Your safari with Imvelo extends beyond wildlife viewing. The company works closely with local communities by supporting healthcare, education, clean water access, and other development programs. During your stay, you can visit nearby villages, meet local residents, accompany children on their walk to school during term time, and gain a deeper understanding of the positive impact these initiatives create.

Imvelo also leads important conservation efforts throughout the region. By providing water for wildlife, protecting habitats from wildfires, and managing the innovative Community Rhino Conservation Initiative, the company plays a vital role in safeguarding Hwange’s ecosystems. These efforts have helped successfully reintroduce white rhinos to the park and continue to support the long-term preservation of Zimbabwe’s wildlife heritage.

When you choose Imvelo Safari Lodges, you enjoy an authentic safari experience while directly supporting conservation and community development in one of Africa’s most extraordinary wildlife destinations.

Community and Conservation

For more than twenty years, Imvelo Safari Lodges has fostered a meaningful balance between people and nature, guided by the belief that tourism, conservation, and community development can thrive together. Through the support of generous donors and contributions generated from guest safaris, Imvelo continues to expand initiatives that create lasting positive impact. These programs are carefully designed to support one another, helping empower local communities while promoting environmental sustainability. By choosing to travel with Imvelo, guests become part of these efforts and directly contribute to conservation and community development initiatives.

Together We Thrive

By electing to build select properties on local community-owned land, Imvelo Safari Lodges are able to support villages from the grassroots up. This includes the employment of over 100 locals, school and education improvement, fresh water supplies and mobile health clinics.

• White Rhino in Hwange: Imvelo Safari Lodges’ long-standing dedication to conservation and community development led to the creation of the Community Rhino Conservation Initiative (CRCI), a program that empowers local communities to take an active role in protecting wildlife while directly benefiting from the initiative itself. Through CRCI, local residents are provided with employment opportunities, encouraged to participate in conservation awareness efforts, and supported through projects that help reduce human-wildlife conflict by creating a buffer zone between protected park areas and village lands. The initiative also generates revenue that communities can use for development projects based on their own priorities. Income raised from the first two CRCI rhinos, Thuza and Kusasa, is currently helping fund the Ngamo Clinic. By placing communities at the center of conservation efforts, Imvelo continues to create meaningful and lasting positive impacts throughout the region.
• Clean Water: Access to clean drinking water is essential for healthy communities, especially in the dry regions of western Zimbabwe, where water shortages are common. Imvelo Safari Lodges supports local villages by drilling and maintaining boreholes that provide reliable, clean water for both people and livestock. To date, Imvelo has established more than 90 boreholes across four districts, helping around 16,000 people and their animals. In partnership with Wills Wells, the organization continues to install, repair, and maintain bush and solar-powered water systems that make a lasting impact on local communities.
• Food Provision: People along Hwange’s southern boundary are subsistence farmers, growing the food they eat. They are extremely vulnerable to human-wildlife conflict, poor soil fertility, erratic rainfall, and social isolation. Encouraging food security is therefore a priority. Imvelo supports communities with food aid, trialling drought-resistant seeds, and setting up irrigated and fenced communal gardens. Another significant focus is on providing a meal at school to encourage children to make the daily, sometimes long, walk to school, help them concentrate in class and take part in sports, while teachers also get ration packs.
• Health Care: In 2017, with the support of generous donors, Imvelo Safari Lodges began constructing the Ngamo Clinic, which welcomed its first patient in September 2022 and has since transformed access to healthcare in the region. The Community Rhino Conservation Initiative now plays a key role in supporting this facility, highlighting the wider social benefits of wildlife conservation. Another key health program is the annual Smile and See Safari, launched in 2011, which provides free dental and eye care to rural communities through the support of Spanish and Italian volunteers from Smile is a Foundation. Over the past decade, the initiative has treated more than 36,000 patients. In addition, Imvelo guests and supporters from Australia are helping drive development projects in Sidinda, benefiting the local clinic, Sidinda Primary School, and Lumbora Secondary School, with meaningful improvements in infrastructure, services, and local livelihoods.
• Education: Supporting education in communities living on the frontline of wildlife areas is a key priority for Imvelo Safari Lodges, which currently assists 14 local schools. This support includes infrastructure development such as classroom blocks, teachers’ cottages, ablution facilities, boreholes, and school gardens, as well as classroom furniture, textbooks (in partnership with the Hwange Schools Project), teaching assistant salaries, bursaries, uniforms, and training workshops. At Ngamo Secondary School, Imvelo funded the construction of its first high school classroom block in 2010 through donor support. By 2011, continued contributions had enabled the development of additional classroom blocks, teachers’ housing, sanitation facilities, and increased student enrolment. Further improvements followed in 2012 and 2013, including more teachers’ cottages and a fully equipped borehole. In 2023, the school also received two dormitories and an ablution block to support boarding students from distant communities. Guests are welcome to visit local schools, where they are warmly received by students, and may also contribute through the Pack for a Purpose initiative by bringing school supplies such as stationery.

A Voice for Wildlife

Beyond its community initiatives, Imvelo Safari Lodges also runs dedicated programs focused on protecting wildlife and conserving natural landscapes. The organization believes that meaningful community development is only possible alongside healthy ecosystems and thriving wildlife.

Imvelo recognizes that people and wildlife are deeply interconnected, and its conservation strategy reflects this. Lodges are intentionally developed along park boundaries or peripheral areas to minimize environmental impact within protected zones and to ensure collaboration with local communities rather than central authorities. This approach reduces pressure on core conservation areas while strengthening partnerships with surrounding villages, where conservation efforts are most critical. For Imvelo, these edge landscapes represent the true frontline of wildlife conservation.

• Rhino Project: Imvelo Safari Lodges are spearheading the return of white rhinos to Hwange. The project is called CRCI—Community Rhino Conservation Initiative and is a massive paradigm shift to introduce rhinos onto community land; this is a world first for white rhinos. At its peak in the 1980s, the rhino population in Hwange National Park numbered several hundred, of which about 120 were white rhinos. By the early 2000s, poaching had once again eradicated the population from the park. The communities living on the park’s south-eastern edge are already conservation-conscious, and CRCI builds on this to establish highly protected rhino sanctuaries on community land bordering the park. This is to be the catalyst for a bigger conservancy and buffer zone between the park and communities, supporting local people through gate entry fees, employment, increased tourism, and reduced human-wildlife conflict. This is certainly one of the most groundbreaking conservation projects in Africa today.
• Wildlife Protection: Imvelo Safari Lodges employs more than 40 local community wildlife protection scouts who play a vital role in safeguarding both wildlife and surrounding communities. Known as the Cobras Community Wildlife Protection Unit, this highly trained team is responsible for rhino protection, reducing human-wildlife conflict, supporting conservation education, preventing wildfires, and assisting with anti-poaching efforts. The Cobras are not only dedicated to their work but also serve as positive role models within their communities, inspiring younger generations. Working alongside the wider Imvelo team, they respond proactively to conservation challenges, helping to protect wildlife while supporting sustainable tourism and community well-being.
• Water for Wildlife: Imvelo manages nearly a quarter of the waterholes that sustain Hwange’s wildlife—a massive commitment of which Imvelo is truly proud! Hwange National Park is one of the few great parks of Africa without any major rivers or lakes. Due to this, animals, including large herds of elephants, congregate in enormous numbers around the waterholes, particularly during the dry season. Imvelo operates 18 pumps in and around Hwange National Park, which provide essential water for wildlife throughout the year. During the dry season, from May to November, Imvelo increases its pumping program with solar hybrid pumps that allow for pumping to continue throughout the night. This is a mammoth logistical operation, with pump attendants stationed in remote places needing regular delivery of rations, supplies, and diesel, while repairs and maintenance are continuous.
• Wildfire Prevention: During Zimbabwe’s dry months, the grass is incredibly vulnerable to fire and Hwange is usually victim to several annual bushfires, sometimes started by humans, putting at risk the vegetation that so many animals rely on. Imvelo’s presence on the edge of the park enables us to quickly detect and react to any destructive wildfires. Imvelo Safari Lodges takes direct responsibility for a network of 280km of fireguards on the border and in the park, and every year they fight wildfires alongside the hard-pressed National Parks and Forestry Commission rangers.
• Mitigating Conflict with Wildlife: The long boundary between Tsholotsho Communal Land and Hwange National Park is an area of significant human-wildlife conflict, where elephants frequently raid crops and severely impact food security, while lions and hyenas often prey on livestock. In conservation terms, this is considered a “hard boundary,” and when Imvelo Safari Lodges began working in the area, local attitudes toward wildlife were largely negative due to these challenges. Through ongoing conservation and community initiatives, however, residents are now receiving meaningful and life-changing benefits from the presence of wildlife in their area. As these benefits grow, perceptions are gradually shifting, and the “hard boundary” is beginning to soften both socially and physically, supported in part by the Community Rhino Conservation Initiative. Guest participation in Imvelo’s programs also contributes to this transformation, helping to turn conflict into cooperation and strengthen community-based conservation efforts.
• Conservation Awareness: Community-based conservation starts with awareness and experiencing benefits from wildlife. Annually, in conjunction with the Rural District Councils and traditional leaders, Imvelo Safari Lodges are involved in dozens of community meetings, both formal and informal. The aim is to continuously increase local awareness and garner an ongoing commitment to wildlife conservation, by all levels of the community as they recognize the significant benefits that accrue from sustainable tourism. Imvelo prioritizes raising awareness in schools of the importance and benefits of wildlife conservation as well as of conservation career opportunities.