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Adopt an Acre® Today!
Sidebar: Partners in Africa
Go Deeper
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Manyara Ranch is not the kind of conservation success story you might expect to find in Montana or northern Mexico. When the property was finally protected from developers, the work had just begun.
That’s because AWF and other environmental groups working on the ground in Africa have pioneered a kind of community conservation adapted to the challenges of protecting land in countries where poverty and other community problems are front and center. “Without benefits accruing to local people around protected areas, conservation won’t work,” says AWF’s Henson. The idea is to share the benefits of successful conservation with local communities and in the process take some pressure off both land and wildlife.
The Conservancy hopes to learn from AWF’s experience brokering these kinds of win-win schemes. Communities near Manyara, for instance, can graze their animals and use water from the ranch during times of drought. And the buzz around Manyara Ranch has already created more than 30 local jobs. The trust has hired a ranch manager and game scouts, rehabilitated six staff houses, and begun a biological inventory of the ranch. The fences were removed so as not to hinder wildlife migration. And more opportunities are in the offing, including beekeeping and a proposed ecotourism lodge.
Another part of the trust’s agreement to work with local communities included assuming responsibility for a dilapidated public boarding school on the ranch serving more than 800 primary students. The school, which hadn’t seen a repair crew in 20 years, had been built in the center of the ranch—and in the middle of the wildlife corridor.
The students and teachers kept having “run-ins” with lions and other animals wandering through the schoolyard, says AWF’s Henson. The trust realized that drastic steps needed to be taken and raised $850,000 to build a new school on the edge of the ranch—closer to the main road and local towns, and away from migrating animals. The school will soon be ready to open.
To create a commercially sustainable ranch, the trust began working to restore Manyara’s former reputation as a supplier of top-quality beef. It purchased world-class Boran breeding bulls with the aim of turning a profit on the local safari tourism circuit.
The ranch is also working with local Masai herders to help them genetically upgrade their cattle stock by allowing them to bring their cows to breed with the beefier Boran bulls. “The goal is to help the Masai enter the tourist market for beef as well, to help them move beyond subsistence cattle herding,” says Henson. Families potentially can make more money tending a smaller herd of higher-quality cattle, thereby reducing damage from overgrazing, which has been a factor in turning patches of East Africa into a dust bowl.
The challenge is changing the way the community thinks about cattle, cautions AWF’s Kiruswa: The Masai’s yardstick for measuring success is how many cattle a man owns, not how healthy or productive or environmentally compatible they are.
But with the backing of partners like the Conservancy, Kiruswa thinks conservation and local community values can be reconciled. “The Tanzania Land Trust is just a baby. In five to 10 years, if we can acquire half a million acres, we can be the engine for transforming the livelihood of the Masai,” says Kiruswa. “The survival of the grasslands of East Africa will depend on the survival of the Masai.”
This recognition is what drives AWF’s vision of conservation in concert with local communities and has made the group a key strategic partner for the Conservancy. “When AWF staff speak about ‘local communities’ in Africa, they are not referring to an abstract theoretical concept, they are referring in most cases to their own aunts, uncles and cousins,” says AWF CEO Bergin. “We are one of the most progressive and experienced international conservation organizations in working with local communities.”
This notion that the fates of mankind and nature are intertwined is an old sensibility. Back in Narobi, Ogeli Ole Makui echoes the words of wisdom he heard from a Masai elder long ago.
“I remember one old man telling me,” Makui says, flashing back to his gazelle-chasing childhood, “when the lion goes, the first thing that will go is the wildlife. The second thing is our cattle. And the third thing is ourselves.”
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Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photos © Henner Frankenfeld/Redux (Masai); © Henner Frankenfeld/
Redux (School)
