Chimfunshi

Research, Education, and Community Engagement

The Chimfunshi teaching initiative brings research, education, and community collaboration together in a shared field setting. Building on long-standing scientific ties between Leipzig and the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia, the initiative is designed to make academic teaching concrete, interdisciplinary, and socially embedded. Students do not encounter research, conservation, and outreach as separate domains. They experience how these activities can reinforce one another in practice. At its core, the initiative aims to train students in a form of science that is rigorous, collaborative, and locally engaged. While researchers study chimpanzee behaviour in large social groups under near-natural conditions, students from biology, veterinary medicine, psychology, and education work alongside children, teachers, and members of the local community. This turns teaching into a practical, on-site experience embedded in existing local structures rather than a detached field excursion.

A distinctive feature of the initiative is its interdisciplinary design. Students from different fields contribute complementary perspectives to a shared project environment: behavioural research, education, conservation, and community-oriented work are linked rather than separated. In the award-winning Zambia project, this included creative mathematics lessons using geometric materials, workshops on sustainable beeswax processing, and activities connected to education, conservation, and preventive healthcare. The initiative therefore combines academic learning with practical problem-solving and sustained local relevance. What makes Chimfunshi especially distinctive is that it creates value on multiple levels at once. For students, it offers direct experience in interdisciplinary collaboration, field-based teaching, and research in an internationally recognized comparative setting. For the department, it strengthens the connection between scientific research and training. For local partners and communities, it is designed to contribute something tangible rather than simply extract data or provide short-term exposure.

The Chimfunshi setting is central to this model. The sanctuary in northern Zambia is one of the world’s largest chimpanzee sanctuaries and an internationally recognized site for research on chimpanzee social behaviour, cognition, and communication. At the same time, it is embedded in a broader local context of education, employment, conservation, and community support. This makes it an unusual and particularly productive environment in which research, teaching, and engagement can be brought together in a single long-term partnership.

Taken together, the Chimfunshi initiative represents a distinctive form of university teaching: interdisciplinary, research-led, field-based, and locally embedded. Its purpose is not only to train students, but to show how science, education, and partnership can be organized in ways that are intellectually serious, practically relevant, and sustainable over time.

Find our more about Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage here.