Starting with four white rhino, it now has more than 30, has relocated 28 others to other areas, and pays its significant costs with tourist receipts instead of charity or government subsidies.
Success stories like the Khama Rhino Sanctuary will likely be drowned out at the wildlife conference amid the gloom and stark statistics of the current poaching crisis.
Five to 10 per cent of Africa's remaining 400,000 elephants are killed each year, raising the mathematical probability of extinction with a decade or two.
In South Africa, a rhino was poached on average every eight hours in 2013. Only 25,000 remain in the wild. Prices for horn and tusk have never been higher, bringing international criminal networks into the trade. That is why places like Khama Rhino Sanctuary can offer hope, and a model to follow. Similar small programmes flourish in Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia.
"Our ... focus has been to make local people aware that these animals are worth more alive than dead," Moremi Tjibae, the sanctuary's chief warden, said. "If you poach a rhino, maybe you will benefit for today, and maybe tomorrow. If you protect it, everyone benefits, and their children, and their children's children. All our schools and clinics, they are paid in part by money from tourists who come to see the animals."
This is the "hearts and minds approach" to protecting Africa's wildlife: winning local populations to your argument and demonising poachers. Most conservationists favour it as the best long-term solution.
Damien Mander, the International Anti-Poaching Federation's (IAPF) founder and a former Australian Special Forces sniper, is blunt about the softly-softly approach.
"Hearts and minds rolls off the tongue so neatly but it's not yet worked, anywhere," he said. "Meanwhile, we're losing animals so fast they're all going to be dead by the time we win over all these people. We need something happening on the ground, now, to stop the haemorrhaging, while the rest of the world talks about coming up with a solution."
He has brought battlefield tactics and tools to the African bush: drones for aerial surveillance, night-vision scopes, ambushes, covert and overt patrolling, powerful modern weapons, intelligence gathering.
Mander's perpetual show of force works. The last poachers to try their luck on the game reserve where the IAPF is based were arrested three years ago. "The three of them are now serving a combined 37 years behind bars," said Mander.
Such successful prosecutions are rare. Evidence goes missing or is corrupted from the outset.
To some conservationists, jailing Africans caught with tusks, or pouring millions into drones or ranger patrols, or working to win community hearts and minds, is all fighting only one front in the war.
Peter Knights, who heads the charity WildAid, argues that souring the perception of ivory and rhino horn ownership is crucial. "As a movement we're putting a minuscule amount of money into this compared to the prevention side, the supply side. We need to look more closely at reducing the demand at the market end, where it's sold."
