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Sidebar: Partners in Africa
Go Deeper
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South of Kenya on that migration-route superhighway lies Tanzania, home to some of the most well-known wildlife parks in the world, including the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater and Tarangire. Huge migrations of animals roam from park to park across the rolling plains that sprawl southward from the slopes of Kilimanjaro.
But these wide-open spaces are experiencing rapid change: farm fields and fences now fragment the corridors that carry wildlife. Many herding communities are now supplementing their livelihoods by settling down and planting crops, adding fences, homes and other buildings to areas where nomadic lifestyles have been the norm.
Given these pressures, protecting the private lands that connect parks is now a crucial priority, says AWF’s Adam Henson. “Many national parks in Tanzania are basically located around the dry-season watering holes, where animals congregate,” he says. “But they are simply too small to contain wildlife year-round.”
That’s why AWF helped preserve the Manyara Ranch in northern Tanzania six years ago, setting up one of the first land trusts in Tanzania in the process. The 45,000-acre tract is situated between the Tarangire and Lake Manyara National Parks, where it makes up a large chunk of the Kwaku-chinja wildlife corridor. The ranch serves as the last remaining link for elephants, wildebeests and other animals to travel between the two parks during the ebb and flow of the dry and wet seasons.
Manyara was once a thriving private cattle ranch. When the Tanzanian government acquired control of the land in the 1970s, Manyara slowly slid into unprofitability. The herd dwindled from 12,000 strong to a tenth that size. As the ranch crumbled from neglect, the government prepared to rid itself of a headache by holding a real estate sale.
“Manyara Ranch was going to be sold to private investors for livestock production,” says James Kahurananga, who directs AWF’s Tanzania program. “It was most likely going to be fenced off and the wildlife corridor blocked forever.”
But in 2001 the government did an about-face. AWF had proposed creating a land trust as an alternative to the sale. And a coalition of international partners and local communities rallied behind the trust plan, which would not only preserve the wildlife corridor but also require the ranch to become economically self-sustaining and provide benefits for local communities.
On April 19, 2001, Tanzania’s president gave in to community pressure and signed over the land—worth about $2.2 million—to the Tanzania Land Conservation Trust, created by AWF. “They gave it to us,” says Steven Kiruswa, a 43-year-old Masai who went to college in Virginia and is now director of AWF’s Masai Steppe Heartland.
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photos © Henner Frankenfeld/Redux (Masai); © Anup Shah/
Naturepl.com (Giraffes)
