Land for life
Our Land for Life project is supporting community efforts to help people and wildlife thrive in Kenya and Tanzania.
Land for Life appeal
Thank you to everyone who supported our UK Aid Match appeal, which ran from 2 November 2020 to 1 February 2021 and allowed your donations to have double the impact.
Together we raised £4.76 million during the appeal, including £2 million from the UK government. Donations for the Land for Life project are supporting vital community efforts to help people and wildlife coexist and thrive in Kenya and Tanzania. Funds are also supporting WWF’s wider conservation work around the world.
The project
The Maasai people have lived successfully alongside wildlife such as elephants and lions for centuries. But the land around them is changing – under pressure from privatisation, growing human population, poorly planned development and expanding agriculture.
Fences and roads are increasing the fragmentation of habitats in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. The destruction and loss of grasslands, forests and freshwater habitats has brought new problems. For one thing, with less land to share, there’s more contact and conflict between people and wild animals – which often doesn’t end well. When wildlife threatens your livelihood, conservation becomes less of a priority.
Poverty is common in this region. Climate change, and more recently, Covid-19, has made lives and livelihoods even more precarious. Communities who had put so much effort into sustainable ecotourism projects saw them all but collapse in 2020. Many people face food shortages. In the struggle to earn a living some have been resorting to unsustainable activities, such as wildlife poaching or cutting down trees for fuelwood.
The Maasai need urgent assistance, as does the wildlife in their care. That’s where our Land for Life project comes in.
How is Land for Life helping?
Our Land for Life project aims to improve the wellbeing of more than 27,000 people in this part of east Africa. The project is led by WWF-Kenya and WWF-Tanzania in collaboration with local communities, together with African People & Wildlife and the South Rift Association of Land Owners (SORALO) – our key partners who have worked in the region for many years.
Through conservation that’s owned and driven by communities, we are supporting local people to manage their natural resources sustainably, with benefits for people and wildlife.
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© Greg Armfield / WWF-UKMore Building living walls to protect livestock from wildlife
Many Maasai depend on livestock for their livelihoods, however their cows, goats and sheep are often attacked by lions, hyaena and other predators – mainly because there’s less natural prey available and livestock are easy targets. Elephants in search of food and water can also cause serious crop damage and injury to people.
To reduce this type of human-wildlife conflict, African People & Wildlife (APW), with support from the Land for Life project, partners with communities to build Living Walls – environmentally-friendly corrals that keep livestock safe. Commiphora trees (or similar) are planted in a circle around the perimeter of a livestock enclosure and secured with chain-link fencing. Over time the trees continue to grow, adding height to the wall and further reinforcing protection for the livestock within.
A recent study shows that people who own Living Walls are more likely to be positive and optimistic about coexisting with large carnivores. To date, over 225 new Living Walls positively impact more than 2912 people and keep over 33,840 livestock safe every night. Living Walls have led to the planting of more than 25,350 living Commiphora or similar trees.
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© Greg Armfield / WWF-UKMore Supporting Human Wildlife Coexistence Officers
Predators and larger mammals threaten community livelihoods as crops and livestock are lost to wildlife. This brings communities into conflict with these animals and retaliatory killings put both wildlife and people in danger. As natural habitats are lost and longer, more severe droughts threaten the landscape, wildlife is more likely to come into contact with communities and further worsen these issues.
Human-wildlife conflict mitigation is a key priority of the Land for Life project, and one approach towards this is via African People & Wildlife’s (APW) Human Wildlife Coexistence Officers. APW’s Coexistence team provides rapid response to human-wildlife conflict events across 20 rural communities in the greater Lake Natron landscape. They use the ArcGIS Online suite of apps and tools to report from the field on livestock attacks, large carnivore presence, and Living Wall requests. Alongside this they engage with communities directly; as the Coexistence Officers were born and raised where they work in northern Tanzania, they understand the unique challenges faced by local people. When a human-wildlife conflict event occurs, Officers are often able to defuse the situation and prevent their fellow community members from retaliating against wild animals. From July 2022 to June 2023, 40 officers responded to 580 incidents, preventing the killing of at least eight carnivores. Their searches for lost livestock prevented the potential predation of over £515,000 worth of livestock.
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© Greg Armfield / WWF-UKMore Protecting Loita forest
The Loita Forest provides for over 20,000 people who depend on it for water, fuelwood, pasture and medicine. Despite its cultural and environmental significance, Loita faces threats – ongoing land subdivision and crop farming are increasing pressure on the forest. In 2021, the Maasai community in Loita requested WWF-Kenya’s support in securing the forest, to preserve and protect it. As a result, a team from WWF-Kenya held a spatial planning engagement meeting with five communities living in the forest. WWF-Kenya also provided resources for a legal expert to advise the community on the land transition process to help facilitate free, prior and informed consent. Since this time WWF-Kenya has continued to facilitate discussions with government stakeholders at national and county level as well as with community opinion leaders from the 3 sections touching the Loita Forest - namely Morijo, Entasekera and Olorte - with a road map developed for defining the forest boundaries and registration.
Moving forward, more programmatic work will take place in Loita via the WWF-UK supported Land for Life project, facilitating a future in which the forest, local communities, and wildlife can thrive. The Maasai people have been protecting this forest for generations; it is vital they are at the forefront of its conservation in the future.
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© Greg Armfield / WWF-UKMore Keeping rangelands healthy
Rangelands are key for wildlife and livestock. As part of the Land for Life project, African People & Wildlife (APW) have been regenerating communal grazing lands by removing invasive plant species that reduce pasture quality.
Restoring these rangelands is a large undertaking that is made possible by engaging hundreds of local community members, who play an active role in the landscape’s conservation.
Participating communities also receive training on sustainable rangeland management. Community members collect data on their lands such as the presence of invasive plant species, grass height, or the percentage of bare ground. The community’s grazing committee then meet with local government to decide, based on this data, where and when community members can graze their livestock, allowing crucial habitats to regenerate.
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© naturepl.com / Anup Shah / WWFMore Addressing human-wildlife conflict hotspots
Whilst rehabilitating rangelands, the project also controlled an invasion of thorny invasive trees (Prosopis Junifore) in Nguruman in Kenya in order to reduce wildlife attacks on community members. This involved the manual removal and clearing of Prosopis Junifore along major footpaths and around waterpoints. Over the course of 8 days a total 120 community members were employed to help clear the invasive species. As a result: 24km of road and footpaths were cleared. This is allowing 5182 community members to use areas zoned from agriculture and to safely access schools, homesteads, grazing areas and urban centres, all with reduced risk of conflict with elephants and buffalo.
As part of this, the community helped address a particular problem area around a major water source for elephants and people. A previously open area had become choked by the thick, thorny shrub which was allowing elephants to get close to people without them being aware of the dangers until it was too late. Many children need to pass the water source on their way to school, and following an elephant attack on a child, WWF’s partner, SORALO, worked with the community to agree that positive action was needed. As a result, over 120 community members were enlisted to help with the clearing, creating four, 100 meters-wide pathways. This is now allowing people to spot elephants at distance and avoid them. It also means that both the community and the elephants can share the water without either coming to harm. With water at a premium in Kenya, this is a win for both people and wildlife.
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© Juozas Cernius / WWF-UKMore Supporting sustainable livelihoods
Co-developing sustainable, nature-friendly enterprises can improve livelihoods and lift people out of poverty. The establishment and strengthening of business enterprises such as sunflowers, poultry and apiculture is already well underway by WWF-Tanzania, including direct training provided to approximately 737 people and the establishment of producer groups. The project also supports a number of employment opportunities for both men and women including as community scouts, human wildlife conflict officers and ilaretok (helpers). Our partner, SORALO, provided salaries for 77 ‘ilaretok’ to recover lost livestock and warn local community members of dangerous wildlife in the area. Ilaretok are recruited from 22 villages within Loita, Olorte, Shompole and Olkiramatian where human wildlife conflict is high. The ilaretok have conducted 5,775 patrol days, providing 30,905 community members with information on the presence of dangerous wildlife, support to find lost livestock, and improved response to incidents of human-wildlife conflict.
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© Greg Armfield / WWF-UKMore Improving transboundary collaboration
Land for Life will be more successful if Kenya and Tanzania cooperate at both political and community levels across their shared border. Through joint action planning with partners, communities and stakeholders across the border, we’re supporting collaborative decision-making and planning on important issues such as freshwater and rangeland management, to benefit the people and wildlife living in the landscape.
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© Greg Armfield / WWF-UKMore Safeguarding community wellbeing
Community wellbeing, including the status and challenges related to natural resource governance, access to resources, human wildlife co-existence, and economic wellbeing, is central to the Land for Life project; more peaceful co-existence between people and wildlife, without detrimental effects on local communities. To ensure the project is being successful in this sense, a household wellbeing survey was run at the beginning of the project and is being conducted annually for the duration of the project, helping us track trends in human wellbeing and community outcomes.
To run the survey, SORALO and APW recruit people from local communities and provides training on survey protocols, and the use of a mobile app to gather data.
In addition to this, in the early stages of the project, the team also deployed the Site-level Assessment of Governance and Equity (SAGE) Tool, a multi-day workshop where community members assess the status of governance and equity, plan actions to make improvements, and monitor progress.
After adapting the tool to the local context and training focus group facilitators, we held SAGE workshops with around 200 people in 2022 and will repeat them to measure change over time.
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Where are we working?
Our Land for Life project forms part of WWF’s wider work in the southern Kenya, northern Tanzania region, spanning from Lake Victoria to the Indian ocean.
Stretching between the national parks of the Mara-Serengeti and Amboseli-Kilimanjaro are vast community lands that provide vital habitat and movement routes for wildlife known as ‘wildlife corridors’. Our Land for Life project covers 8,423 km² of these precious landscapes including the Loita forest in Kenya and Lake Natron in Tanzania. These areas include grassland savannahs, dense forests and freshwater systems, which are critical for both people and wildlife.
The project site has many important wildlife corridors, essential for species such as elephants, lions, leopards, cheetah, wild dog and wildebeest to move across this landscape, following traditional migration routes and dispersal patterns.
For further information please visit our FAQ page.
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