Tusk holds the Conservation Awards ceremony at Raffles London on Whitehall on Wednesday 11 November 2026, its annual night for African conservation.
Charles Mayhew founded Tusk in 1990, when the ivory trade was emptying east Africa of elephants and almost no British money was reaching the people trying to stop it. It now raises around fourteen million pounds a year for conservation across the continent, and Prince William has been its royal patron since 2005, taking an unusually active interest and travelling repeatedly to see the work.
The Conservation Awards follow from that. They honour rangers, field biologists and community leaders working in Africa, most of them unknown outside their own countries and several of them doing genuinely dangerous work, and the ceremony is the one night a year that this is put in front of a London audience. The award is a career-changing amount of money to someone running a reserve on a shoestring, and the recognition is often worth more than the cheque.
The 2026 awards are at Raffles London at the OWO on Wednesday 11 November. Tusk publishes the date and the room on its own front page, which is worth noting: a philanthropic gala of this rank is usually invitation-only and unlisted, so most of the London November season is invisible from outside it. This one is not. Tusk’s method has always been to fund African organisations directly rather than to run its own programmes, and the awards are the same principle held up to a room.