About us
In 2013, Stop Ivory was set up by African and British conservationists to address the urgent threat to the African elephant. Entire elephant populations were being slaughtered, as international criminal syndicates profited from the demand for ivory, with the contraband being sold through illicit markets or laundered through legal markets in consumer countries. Seven years later, an incredible international response has changed the fundamentals. The price of ivory in consumer countries has fallen substantially and there are encouraging signs across Africa that elephant populations are stabilizing. Stop Ivory’s founding CEO, Alex Rhodes, always argued that success would be defined by ‘the closing down of operations because we were no longer needed’. Stop Ivory’s board agreed at the beginning of 2020 that this stage had been reached, and is now delighted to announce the formal closure of the organization. In 2014 the leaders of Botswana, Chad, Ethiopia, Gabon and Tanzania, supported by the UK Government and Stop Ivory, launched the Elephant Protection Initiative, (EPI), calling for the closure of domestic ivory markets, the maintenance of the international moratorium on trade in ivory, the placement of government ivory stockpiles beyond economic use and the implementation of the 2010 African Elephant Action Plan.
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