Leading the Way for Amboseli’s Elephants

One of the most studied wildlife populations in Africa, the elephants of Kenya’s Amboseli National Park are the park’s main wildlife viewing attraction. Every year, thousands of tourists visit the area, many of them to view the park’s free-ranging elephants, generating about $3.3 billion in park fees and tourism-related revenues.

As the Amboseli region’s economy has grown, however, its elephants and the people who protect them have faced a new set of challenges. More and more people have settled near the park, increasing the likelihood that humans will come into conflict with the elephants. Lifestyles have also changed, with traditional pastoralist livelihoods giving way to farming and other agri-business. As Amboseli’s elephants leave protected areas, some encroach on farmed areas, damaging property and angering farmers, some of whom retaliate with spearings. Earlier this year, more than a dozen elephants were killed.

“Any such clashes are regrettable and the loss of these celebrated elephants is extremely unfortunate,” says Hamisi Mutinda, an AWF ecologist in the Kilimanjaro Heartland, Kenya. “By working to ensure that wildlife activities ultimately benefit the community, AWF is giving people incentive to conserve the lands elephants need to thrive and thus aims to prevent such killings in the future.”

Partnering with the Kenya Wildlife Service, the Amboseli Elephant Trust, and others, AWF is pioneering conservation models that create revenue streams for local communities. Such models, research has shown, create economic returns that uplift communities and are further invested in conservation.

The recently opened Satao Elerai, a luxury tourism lodge set on 5,000 acres of communally conserved lands is one example of AWF’s conservation models at work. Located just 7.5 miles from Amboseli, the lodge is owned by the Entonet/Elerai Maasai community, which planned and created it with strategic support from AWF. Southern Cross Safaris, a leading private company, operates the lodge and the conservancy as a single high-quality, highly efficient enterprise. Revenues from the lodge are reinvested in further conserving wildlife and lifting community well-being.

AWF is also working to minimize human-elephant conflict by building community awareness of elephant movements and conflict prevention techniques. Such efforts include:

• Convening community meetings to strengthen wildlife management policies. Local community participants, AWF, and other experts meet periodically to review land-use policies, coordinate management strategies across communities, and devise community-driven initiatives.
• Financing the salaries of game scouts. The scouts, employed from the time crops begin to mature in February until harvest time in July, alert farmers to elephant activities and deter elephants from crop raiding. This year AWF will finance the salaries of ten game scouts, up from six in 2009.
• Partnering with community leaders to expand conservancies that generate income for landholders. Recognizing the importance land resources hold for both people and wildlife, AWF is working with local communities to identify opportunities to lease critical lands to conserve wildlife corridors and dispersal areas.

AWF strongly believes that only if conservation lifts people’s livelihoods will Africa’s wildlife and its vast, biodiverse landscapes endure. In the Kilimanjaro Heartland, we are working with our partners to make Amboseli’s elephants a treasured tourism experience that benefits all people.