; Whereas wildlife poaching presents significant security and stability challenges for military and police forces in African nations that are often threatened by heavily armed poachers and the criminal and extremist allies of those poachers; Whereas wildlife poaching negatively impacts local communities that rely on natural resources for economic development, including tourism; Whereas penal and financial deterrents can improve the ability of African governments to reduce poaching and trafficking and enhance their capabilities of managing their resources; Whereas assisting institutions in developing nations, including material, training, legal, and diplomatic support, can reduce illegal wildlife trade; Whereas wildlife provides a multitude of benefits to all nations and wildlife crime has wide-ranging economic, environmental, and social impacts; Whereas the African elephant population has declined by 27 percent in the last decade, primarily as a result of poaching, and only approximately 415,000 such elephants remain in Africa; Whereas, from 2007 to 2012, the number of elephants killed in Kenya increased by more than 800 percent, from 47 to 387 elephants killed; Whereas, as a result of poaching, forest elephant populations in Minkébé National Park in Gabon have declined by 78 to 81 percent; Whereas the number of forest elephants in the Congo Basin in Central Africa declined by approximately 2/3 between 2002 and 2012, placing forest elephants on track for extinction in the next decade; Whereas the number of rhinoceroses killed by poachers in South Africa— (1) increased by more than 9,000 percent between 2007 and 2014, from 13 to more than 1,200 rhinoceroses killed; and (2) was 1,175 in 2015; Whereas fewer than 4,000 tigers remain in the wild throughout all of Asia; Whereas pangolins are often referred to as the most trafficked mammal in the world