A U.S. wildlife support group working with the Mozambican government has become arguably the first in Africa to successfully clamp down on elephant poaching, while other southern African countries are struggling to cope with culling and hunting of wild animals.

The New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has announced that not a single elephant has been poached in the last year in Mozambique’s Niassa Reserve.

Only eight years ago, 11,000 elephants roamed the massive park – at 16,000 square miles it’s larger than Switzerland.

But organized gangs of poachers cut down close to 7,500 elephants in the park, until WCS stepped in.

Working with Mozambique, an elite and armed rapid deployment force has been deployed.

“It is critical to have constant monitoring and rapid response from the air,” Joe Walston, Senior Vice-President for Global Programmes for WCS told Fox News. WCS have provided an aircraft and two helicopters to assist ground forces.

Helping keep the poachers at bay is the tough reputation of those protecting the elephants, and the introduction of stiff sentences - being caught with a firearm in the park can lead to a jail term of up to 16 years.

The work by WCS and Mozambique is bucking the trend elsewhere in Africa, where the population of elephants across the continent has dropped by a fifth in the past decade. The International Union for Conservation of Nature reports that more than 110,000 of the animals have been slaughtered, mostly for their ivory tusks.

That’s why it’s extremely significant that Walston anticipates taking Niassa’s elephant numbers in the opposite direction: “Now is the time we will hopefully see the recovery of the elephant in Niassa, we are looking forward to repopulating here”.

Already the park’s elephant population has increased by approximately 250 in the past two years.