How one South African social enterprise initiative is closing the gap between formal fire governance and the people who need it most
When Meat Naturally Africa quietly became a member of the Vryheid Fire Protection Association (FPA) in May 2026, it might have looked like a routine administrative step – one
organisation joining another. But for the 15 rural communities scattered across the communal rangelands surrounding Vryheid in KwaZulu–Natal, it marks the beginning of something far more significant: a bridge between the formal fire governance structures of South Africa and the millions of smallholder farmers and community members who have, for too long, faced the devastation caused by veld fires largely on their own.
“We only joined this month,” says Guy Deacon, Technical Director and co-founder of Meat Naturally Africa (MNA), a farmer-owned social enterprise that works with rural communities across Southern Africa on regenerative grazing and land conservation. “But the intention is clear – once you’ve got a seat at the table, you can start slowly introducing the communities to the FPA and build much-needed relationships.”
It is a strategy built on patience and trust – two currencies that matter enormously when working in communal landscapes where formal institutions have historically been distant, or absent altogether.
Why the Vryheid FPA and why now?
The Vryheid FPA is a localised organisation operating in northern KwaZulu-Natal, dedicated to preventing and managing veld and forest fires. Like other FPAs across the country, it operates under the National Veld and Forest Fire Act and coordinates with the KwaZulu-Natal Fire Protection Association (KZNFPA), pooling resources, expertise and early warning systems to protect landowners from one of the most destructive forces in the South African landscape.
Membership is structured around hectares — landowners pay a fee based on land size and property usage and in return gain access to different tiers of support, from fire danger index data, discounted equipment and training at the most basic level, through to ground and aerial firefighting support, the latter for those with the largest land holdings and the greatest need. For smallholder communal farmers, even the most basic tier – access to daily fire risk information – can be transformative. For example, all members receive a “presumption of non-negligence” which means that if a fire spreads from a member’s land onto a neighbour’s property, being an FPA member means the person is legally presumed innocent until proven otherwise. Non-members face the reverse legal burden.
And that is precisely what MNA has unlocked for the communities around Vryheid.
“The direct, immediate benefit we’re getting from the Vryheid FPA is daily Fire Danger Index forecasts,” Deacon explains. “That gets circulated to Meat Naturally Africa and we then circulate it to each of those 15 communities. So every day they get the FDI output – what the risk is and what they should and shouldn’t be doing. That’s a powerful tool. Prevention is better than suppression.”
The Fire Danger Index (FDI) is a composite measure drawing on temperature, wind speed, humidity and other climatic factors to assess the likelihood and potential severity of fire on any given day. Armed with this information, community members can make informed decisions – whether to hold off on lighting cooking fires on a high-risk day, whether it is safe to carry out a controlled burn of a firebreak or whether children should be kept away from areas of dry grass. It transforms fire management from a reactive scramble into a proactive daily practice.
Building bridges in communal land
This partnership did not happen in isolation. Meat Naturally Africa has been developing its fire management strategy for five years, since launching its community-based fire management programme in 2021. The organisation now works with 180 communities and associations managing restoration across 580 000 hectares of communal rangelands in South Africa – and fire is threaded through almost every dimension of that work.
“All the areas we work in are at risk of wildfire,” says Deacon. “The whole of South Africa is at risk. It comes down to fuel loads (the amount of combustible material available in a specific area) and humans. If you’ve had a good rain season, you generally end up with high fuel loads and are more at risk for fires.”
Ironically, Meat Naturally Africa has found that improving land condition can actually increase fire risk in the short term. As degraded rangelands begin to recover under regenerative grazing practices, grass biomass increases and with it, the potential fuel for fire. It is a somewhat counterintuitive challenge: Success in restoration creates new vulnerabilities.
“When communities started improving their rangelands, we actually saw higher fire risk because they had more fuel loads,” Deacon notes. “So we brought in firebreaks and other measures to help manage that.”
The Vryheid FPA membership is the latest expression of Meat Naturally Africa’s broader strategy of embedding communities within formal fire governance structures.
Elsewhere in South Africa – in the Eastern Cape’s Ngcobo region outside of Queenstown – Meat Naturally Africa has helped communities establish entirely new FPAs through traditional authorities, a development enabled by a recent amendment to the National Veld and Forest Fire Act that, for the first time, formally recognised traditional authorities as entities that can form and operate FPAs.
“It’s still early days in how that’s going to roll out,” Deacon acknowledges, “but it’s significant. The communal and traditional landscape has been something of a grey area in the past when it comes to fire management so this recognition matters.”
For Vryheid, the strategy is different – joining an existing FPA first, using Meat Naturally Africa’s membership as a doorway through which communities can be gradually introduced, relationships built and the groundwork laid for those communities to eventually hold their own membership.
More than firebreaks: a whole-community approach
One of the most important philosophical underpinnings of Meat Naturally Africa’s approach is the recognition that fire is not just a farmer’s problem.
“Over ninety-five percent of fires are ignited by humans,” Deacon says. “A lot of fires come from the villages themselves. If you’re only focusing on farmers putting in firebreaks to protect their winter grazing, you’re not tackling the problem of where the ignitions are happening. It’s everybody’s problem.”
This means Meat Naturally Africa’s fire management work reaches well beyond the farmers who are formally part of its associations. Awareness campaigns run in schools. Traditional healers are engaged. Traditional authorities are involved in planning. The approach draws on the international concept of community–based fire management – similar to what is called “Fire Smart” in Canada or “Firewise” in the United States – and adapts it to the South African communal context.
“We teach communities to identify the risks they face,” Deacon explains, “to do a risk assessment, develop a fire management plan and then take small, practical steps – clearing defensible spaces around homesteads, reducing fuel loads, making their homes more fire-resistant. Things they can actually do themselves.”
It is a view echoed by Steven Hibbert, Vryheid FPA fire protection officer: “The majority of fires in our area start in communities themselves. It is through education that we will bring the risk down – and we look forward to building on the progress achieved by Meat Naturally Africa to date with this partnership.”
Meat Naturally Africa’s results, five years on, are tangible.
“There has been a significant reduction in infrastructure lost, animals lost and people lost,” Deacon reflects. “Communities now have the tools, the response systems and plans in place to actually combat them. That’s a profound shift.”
Women at the firebreak
The fire programme has also created space for a more inclusive approach to land management – one that actively brings women into fire governance.
Moses Kibi, Meat Naturally Africa’s Fire Management and Soil Conservation Coordinator, describes a pilot initiative that grew out of a recognition that fire, like livestock management, had long been treated as the domain of men.
“We identified associations where we wanted the buy-in of women,” Kibi explains. “It seemed like it was only men dealing with fires and we wanted to encourage women to be part of the solution as fire is a responsibility for everyone.”
For example, nearly 50% of those involved in Meat Naturally Africa’s Fleece Naturally (FN) initiative are women. Women in Wool and Wildfire is a pilot for FN’s female small-stock farmers. Over the last three years, a significant number of wildfires in the communities have come from cooking stoves or children playing with fire and so it is essential to involve more women in the fire committees. Incentives are offered to female small-stock owners who agree to be trained and implement wildfire prevention awareness amongst women and children and are trained and compliant with Responsible Wool Standards (RWS) for certification. This innovation will not only result in increased participation of women in higher value wool production, it can also result in greater livestock sales in their community because of fewer uncontrolled wildfires decimating rangelands.
“There are women in those areas who are now actively burning firebreaks,” Kibi says. “It is a small but meaningful step towards a more gender-equitable model of fire governance – one where the full fabric of a community, not just its male farmers, is enrolled in protecting the landscape.”
Looking forward
The membership in the Vryheid FPA is, Deacon believes, a first step in a longer journey. Over the next year, Meat Naturally Africa will work to introduce the 15 communities it supports in the area to the FPA, building relationships and demonstrating the value of formal membership – daily FDI alerts, access to training, equipment subsidies and the possibility of ground or aerial support when a fire gets out of hand. The goal is for those communities to eventually hold their own membership, their own seat at the table.
It is an approach that reflects the patient, community–centred philosophy that has defined Meat Naturally Africa’s work since its founding – the understanding that lasting change in a landscape, whether in grazing practices or fire management, comes not from top-down instruction but from building trust, sharing knowledge and giving communities the tools to act for themselves.
“We can’t remove the risk,” Deacon says. “But we can reduce it. And that starts with making sure that no community faces the next fire season alone.”
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