How intact is Africa’s biodiversity—and how would we know? This talk will present key findings and reflections from a regional assessment of biodiversity intactness across sub-Saharan Africa, motivated by the need for large-scale biodiversity information that better reflects the region’s ecological and social realities. At the heart of this work is a collaborative process that brought together 200 experts in African biodiversity. Using structured expert elicitation, we translated place-based knowledge on Africa’s changing landscapes into a regional map of the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII), comparing present-day species abundances to pre-industrial baselines. This approach foregrounds regional knowledge and experience, offering an alternative to global models that often overlook local context. The results reveal widespread but uneven biodiversity loss, with particularly strong declines in large mammals and in intensive agricultural landscapes. We also find that over 80% of the region’s remaining wild plants and animals occur outside of state protected areas, calling for diverse and inclusive conservation models. I will reflect on the opportunities and challenges of building indicators through expert-driven processes, and what this means for shaping more grounded and effective biodiversity policy.