Managing wildlife resources requires balancing the needs of people living near wildlife-protected areas (PAs) with the grazing and habitat needs of wildlife. However, rising encroachment by households seeking new land for agriculture and increasing wildlife populations from wildlife-protected areas result in human-wildlife conflicts. Furthermore, protecting wildlife resources needs decreasing and restricting their illegal harvest, especially by people living near wildlife-protected areas, thereby imposing an opportunity cost on these households, who often depend on poaching for their livelihood. In this paper, we use a discrete choice experiment (DCE) based on a split sample of respondents living inside and outside the Game Management Area (GMA) near Kafue National Park in Zambia. The aim is to estimate the opportunity cost of conservation imposed on communities living near the national park under a hypothetical protection scenario in which households would receive various incentives in exchange for stopping poaching. Proposed incentives included donations of agro-input packs, donations of milking cows, and the presence of a community micro-credit facility. In addition, two measures aimed at discouraging poaching were an increase in the frequency of patrols by wildlife game scouts per week and an increase in the minimum number of years in jail for poaching offenders. In a test of external validity, we find that households living inside the GMA report a lower mean willingness to accept (WTA) compensation for the provision of wildlife conservation services compared to those outside the GMA. The study also reveals differences in other welfare-related preferences between respondents within and outside the GMA. Our methodology provides useful insights for policy prescription in addressing the problem of poaching and poverty alleviation in developing countries.