Snow Leopard Enterprises helps people in snow leopard areas increase their household income while helping to protect the cat and its habitat.

The Snow Leopard Trust and its local partner organizations provide herders living in remote parts of the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, and Pakistan with training and equipment to produce handicrafts from the wool of their sheep and camels.  The Trust markets these products at tourist attractions in Mongolia, at retail stores and events in the United States, and through the Snow Leopard Trust online store. As part of this program, participating communities agree not to kill snow leopards or their prey species, and to follow sustainable herding practices.

Many of the Snow Leopard Enterprises products are made from hand-felted wool.
View a photo slide show of women making felt from wool.

How Snow Leopard Enterprises saves snow leopards

Each fall, participants in Snow Leopard Enterprises sign an agreement committing to specific conservation actions, including a pledge not to kill snow leopards.  Direct killing by hunters is a threat to snow leopards in many parts of their range.  Snow leopards are sometimes poached for their pelts and bones, and sometimes killed in retaliation for preying on domestic livestock (which can cause great hardship for herding families.  Snow Leopard Enterprises helps save snow leopards because the economic benefits of the program make local people less likely to feel that they have to engage in poaching or retaliatory killing to survive.

Program participants also agree not to kill wild sheep and goats--the snow leopard's most important large prey --and to follow sustainable herding practices. When populations of their natural prey species are healthy, snow leopards are less likely to attack domestic livestock.  Good herding practices also keep livestock safe from snow leopard predation. So, these actions help decrease the threat of retaliatory killing.

A cash bonus is available at the end of each year if a participating community has complied with its Snow Leopard Enterprises agreement.  But if just one person violates the contract, the entire community loses the bonus.  This creates peer pressure and encourages the community to work together to prevent poaching by outsiders.

Finally, Snow Leopard Enterprises includes an educational component, with ecological seminars, newsletters, and posters about snow leopards in participating villages.  These activities increase awareness among the local people of the value and benefits of snow leopards and other wildlife species.

How Snow Leopard Enterprises helps families

Many families in remote snow leopard areas survive on the equivalent of just a few hundred dollars (US) each year.  Lacking transportation and access to markets, many families are forced to sell their raw wool to traveling traders for just pennies per kilogram.  By using their wool to make handicrafts that they sell to Snow Leopard Enterprises buyers, participants often increase their household income by 25% and even up to 40%.

Moreover, the income from Snow Leopard Enterprises is paid directly to the women who make the handicrafts. Many women use the extra cash to buy medicines for their families, purchase a greater variety of food to supplement the meat and milk from their livestock, and send their children to school.

More than 350 families, and over 400 individuals, now participate in Snow Leopard Enterprises.

Product development

Developing Snow Leopard Enterprises products requires balancing several different goals.  Designers seek to combine traditional materials, techniques, and symbols with designs and colors that will appeal to the international market.  They also try to create products that are simple to make and that illustrate the conservation aspect of the program, as reflected in the motif of snow leopard paw prints on many items, for example.

Many of the handicrafts currently being produced were developed at a week-long Design Summit in the Kyrgyz Republic in August, 2003.  The summit brought together artists and designers from the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, and Russia; marketing experts from the US; conservation biologists; interpreters; and organizers from Mongolia, the Kyrgyz Republic, and the US.  The event resulted in an expanded Snow Leopard Enterprises product line with lots of new motifs and colors added.

Snow Leopard Trust staff conduct training workshops once or twice a year to teach participants how to make and improve the products.

Snow Leopard Enterprises in Mongolia

The Snow Leopard Enterprises program began in Mongolia in 1997.  It was initially known as Irbis Enterprises because "irbis" is the Mongolian word for "snow leopard."

The Snow Leopard Trust began running the program in 2000.  Today, nearly 300 herder-artisans and their families are involved in Snow Leopard Enterprises in Mongolia.  The program participants hail from 14 communities in six provinces in the mountainous West and desert South of the country.

Snow Leopard Enterprises in the Kyrgyz Republic

The program was renamed Snow Leopard Enterprises when it expanded to the Kyrgyz Republic in 2002.  The Snow Leopard Trust partnered with the Community and Business Forum, a local NGO, to bring Snow Leopard Enterprises to the village of Ak-Shyirak.

Ak-Shyirak is a former Soviet tin-mining town near the Sarychat-Ertash Wildlife Reserve, a remote park that was established to protect snow leopards and their mountain ecosystem.  Located high in the Tien Shan Mountains, Ak-Shyirak is 200 km from the nearest village, and is cut off from the outside world by harsh mountain snows for half the year.  About half of Ak-Shyirak's households currently participate in the program.

Inilchek (or Engilchek), a remote village on the Sarychat-Ertash Reserve's southern border, joined the program in 2004. The village is small, with only 23 households. Eight women participated the first year.

Snow Leopard Enterprises in Pakistan

In 2003, Snow Leopard Enterprises expanded to the mountainous Chitral region of Pakistan. Kuju Bala and Kuju Payeen, two villages separated by a large river, are the first communities to join the program there, with 70 women participating.