The creation of a wildlife reserve with an Indigenous community in one part of Kenya has paid dividends, for animals and people alike
John Leripe, a Samburu warrior, looks down from the Mathews Range over his ancestral homeland in Kenya. It’s a wilderness that has transformed over the last few decades.
In the 1960s and 70s, a severe ivory poaching crisis wiped out the elephant and rhino populations of the region. By 1985, there wasn’t a single elephant recorded in the Mathews Range.
Elephants are ecosystem engineers, and their extinction prompted other wildlife populations to plummet. Slowly, the grasslands that the semi-nomadic pastoralists depended on to graze their cattle began to disappear under scrub.
At the time, poverty rates among the local tribes were twice that of the rest of Kenya, and there was little access to schooling or healthcare. Conflicts regularly broke out over scarce resources.
Things began to change when a conservancy was proposed for the region. The plan was to create a wildlife reserve with Samburu communities, who would help protect species while generating an income through ecotourism.
In 1995, the Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy came into being, across 850,000 acres of wilderness. By 2013, the safari camps were bringing in 18m Kenyan shillings (£175,000) a year for the community, which was spent on education, health and development. Through conserving wildlife, peace and prosperity slowly grew in the region. Today, the population of elephants is back up to 6,000, and giraffes, leopards, cheetahs, buffalo and impala are all steadily increasing too.
“Conservation has provided security for the families living in this valley,” said Leripe. “There are employment opportunities for our brothers and sisters. We have also benefited in a big way with the mobile health clinic. Our ladies and children are healthy. We now have power and plans in regenerating the landscape, which impacts everything and everyone.”
Main image: Ami Vitale
You’re the solution that Positive News needs
Our small, dedicated team is passionate about building a better alternative to the negative news media. And there’s never been a greater urgency to our mission.
But to invest in producing all the solutions journalism that the world is longing for, we need funding. And because we work in your interests – not those of a wealthy media mogul or corporate owner – we’re asking readers like you to get behind our team, by making a regular contribution as a Positive News supporter.
Give once from just £1, or join 1,200+ others who contribute an average of £3 or more per month.
Join our community today, and together, we’ll change the news for good.
