The devel­op­ment and pri­vate sec­tors are increas­ingly con­sid­er­ing “bio­di­ver­sity off­sets” as a strat­egy to com­pen­sate for their neg­a­tive impacts on bio­di­ver­sity, includ­ing impacts on great apes and their habi­tats in Africa. In the absence of national off­set poli­cies in sub-Saharan Africa, off­set design and imple­men­ta­tion are guided by com­pany inter­nal stan­dards, lend­ing bank stan­dards or inter­na­tional best prac­tice prin­ci­ples. We exam­ine four projects in Africa that are seek­ing to com­pen­sate for their neg­a­tive impacts on great ape pop­u­la­tions. Our assess­ment of these projects reveals that not all apply or imple­ment best prac­tices, and that there is lit­tle stan­dard­iza­tion in the meth­ods used to mea­sure losses and gains in species num­bers. Even if they were to fol­low cur­rently accepted best-practice prin­ci­ples, we find that these actions may still fail to con­tribute to con­ser­va­tion objec­tives over the long term. We advo­cate for an alter­na­tive approach in which bio­di­ver­sity off­set and com­pen­sa­tion projects are designed and imple­mented as part of a National Off­set Strat­egy that (1) takes into account the cumu­la­tive impacts of devel­op­ment in indi­vid­ual coun­tries, (2) iden­ti­fies pri­or­ity off­set sites, (3) pro­motes aggre­gated off­sets, and (4) inte­grates bio­di­ver­sity off­set and com­pen­sa­tion projects with national bio­di­ver­sity con­ser­va­tion objec­tives. We also pro­pose sup­ple­men­tary prin­ci­ples nec­es­sary for bio­di­ver­sity off­sets to con­tribute to great ape con­ser­va­tion in Africa. Cau­tion should still be exer­cised, how­ever, with regard to off­sets until fur­ther field-based evi­dence of their effec­tive­ness is available.