Tech tycoon pays ‘natural dividend’ to preserve African island

Mr Mark Shuttleworth, a technology tycoon, will start paying stipends to the inhabitants of an island off Africa’s west coast where he owns luxury resorts to help preserve its biodiversity.

He will pay as much as 20,000 dobras (S$1,200) annually in quarterly instalments to about 3,000 people, around 60 per cent of Principe’s adult population, starting next week, Faya, his non-profit which will disburse the money, said in a statement to Bloomberg.

“We are going to give the adult population of Principe that work with us to preserve the biodiversity of the island what we call a natural dividend,” Mr Jorge Alcobia, Faya’s chief executive officer, said in an earlier interview.

“We don’t have any enforcement capacity and if people decide to do other things they will lose the dividend.” 

The programme is the first of its kind to be run by an individual that aims at preserving a region’s natural endowment, Mr Alcobia said.

Principe is the smaller of the two main islands of the nation of Sao Tome and Principe. UNESCO has designated Principe, part of a former Portuguese colony, and surrounding marine areas a biosphere reserve with one of the world’s highest concentrations of endemic species.

South African-born Shuttleworth, 52, began his career designing Internet security systems in his parents’ garage in Cape Town. He made his fortune selling Thawte Consulting, a company he founded that helps prevent credit-card fraud online, to VeriSign in 2000 for US$652 million (S$826.7 million) in company stock.

He bought the Bom Bom resort on Principe in 2012, and now owns four hotels on the island. His company, HBD Principe, requires the hotels’ guests to pay €25 (S$37) per night towards conservation and community development.

Mr Shuttleworth aims to show “we don’t need to destroy our natural resources to be able to provide better living conditions for the population”, Mr Alcobia said. Mr Shuttleworth was not available for comment. 

Adults who have lived on the island for eight years or more can sign up to receive dividends, and in return are expected not to act in ways that harm the environment. Mr Shuttleworth will also channel money to housing, schooling and other programs to raise living standards.

“The natural dividend aims to create an economic model that simultaneously values environmental preservation and the improvement of local communities’ living conditions,” Mr Faya said in the statement, adding that the Sao Tome and Principe’s government was a signatory to the agreement. 

While the payment plan is envisioned to be a permanent arrangement, an initial three-year pilot will be run at a cost of about €15 million to see if it is sustainable and can be replicated elsewhere, it said. 

The initiative comes at a time of mounting global concern about biodiversity loss, with the World Wildlife Fund estimating that wildlife populations have declined by almost three quarters since 1970. BLOOMBERG