Parks and reserves, created to protect Africa’s unique mammal life increasingly share buffer zones needed for their ecological survival with expanding rural populations, resulting in more conflict. While concern about the encroachment of human activity (or ‘human sprawl’) into natural areas is worldwide, it takes on an extra dimension in eastern and southern Africa, where we find the last large‐scale migrating herds of large mammals. The paper uses the Ngamiland region of Botswana in which the Moremi Game Reserve is situated to discuss problems and options surrounding park buffer zones in a context of rapid national economic growth, high levels of demographic growth and increasing international tourism activity, using human footprint and human sprawl mapping as tools to assess population conservation interaction. The paper argues that it is useful to employ footprint mapping in African protected area buffer zones to reveal specific regional patterns and options in order to enhance the search for workable solutions.