Along the critical wildlife corridor between Amboseli and Tsavo West National Park, the Kimana Community Wildlife Sanctuary is owned and managed by the Kimana-Tikondo Group Ranch members (Kenya). The sanctuary encompasses a swamp fed by two permanent streams, and numerous springs in the upper portion of the swamp, derived from the subterranean waters from Mount Kilimanjaro. The swamp also supports the seasonal Kikarankot river which feeds two seasonal wetlands, namely Olngarua lo Lochalai and Olngarua Lenkerr. This wetland creates a panoramic view between the undulating Chyullu range and Mt. Kilimanjaro, and is home to a wide variety of wildlife. Historically, Kimana-Tikondo Group Ranch was a designated hunting area before the hunting ban in 1977. The ban meant that the local community could no longer use hunting income to fund their children’s education and other community programmes. The sharing programme, initiated by the Sanctuary in 1992, meant that the community could again start to accrue benefits from conservation, mostly by generating tourism revenues for the local community (a more viable use than unsuitable agricultural practices, due to high salinity levels in the area). Once the tourism potential of the Ranch was confirmed, the Kimana area opened up for tourism in and around the Amboseli area as many tour operators made game drives to the Kimana Group Ranch.
However, use of land is quite different in the Tanzanian part of the corridor, especially in Kilimanjaro’s lower elevations, where the traditional agro-pastoral Maasai communities graze their livestock and practice subsistence crop cultivation on large agricultural fields.
Based on integrated land use planning and as a component of conservancies and wildlife ranches, wildlife migratory corridors and dispersal areas were developed to secure conservation zones, with no or only seasonal land use compatible with wildlife migration patterns. In the context of the Southern Kenya Landscape Restoration Initiative, the introduction of sustainable farm and rangeland management aimed at reducing land use pressure on corridors and other critical wildlife habitats. Reforestation of degraded areas, particularly in upstream catchment areas of important river systems such as Mara and Tsavo, would stabilize their water regime and soils and thus provide a sustainable water supply for local communities, wildlife and livestock. Also, water allocation and management plans would be developed and implemented along rivers of particular economic and ecological value to prevent water resource overutilization. Finally, the project current and forecasted carrying capacity of rangelands in critical areas intended to be assessed as a basis for sustainable livestock numbers and grazing systems and demarcated in spatial and land use plans.
Kenya, Tanzania
Corridor action area : Kajiado County (Kenya), Kilimanjaro and Tanga regions (Tanzania) - Crossing the and Tsavo conservation area and the Amboseli National Park
Surface : 177 612 ha
Benefits for local communities and governance of local action : :
The Kimana-Tikondo Group Ranch in Kenya generated profitable touristic incomes from the wildlife sanctuaries that fall into Amboseli wildlife pathway. These incomes are intended to be used to pay school and college bursaries, community scout salaries and provide direct dividends to members of the Ranch.
From the 1990’s, many actions have been developed, consisting in the establishment of conservation enterprises, accompanied by enhanced governance and accountability, conflict resolution and transparency.
Today, some conservation actors work on the development of land use plans in areas within the wildlife corridors and dispersal zones, establishment of community game scouts to help in anti-poaching and human wildlife conflict mitigation, and also training farmers as first responders to human wildlife conflict and introduction of simple tools to scare away wildlife.
Finally, some scholarship and local community engagement programs were developed, thanks to the collaboration of private sector partners and following the apparition of a new source for elephant tourism, that facilitated the emergence of a new stream of revenue for the local community.
More recently, since the management transfer from the national authority designated for the Amboseli National Park (formerly, the Kenyan Wildlife Service), to the Kajiado County government, a vast land transfer program has been implemented,with the aim to open up wildlife corridors. These lands of a million acres, have been owned by residents for land courtesy (historically acquired from group ranches) to make sure human activities are well integrated into conservation efforts. According to the newly-desianted management authority, the County representant (governor), the final goal of this program is to secure the cohabitation between wildlife and local communities, who have been threatened by lions and big fauna crossing over the villages for decades, by involving the locals in management of the park.
Description of human/animal cohabitation issues on the corridor :
Period of time : 1990’s - from 1998 to 2025c
Funding bodies : USAID (United States Agency for International Development), Department of Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs
Lead actors : Kaijado County government (recently designated as the management authority of the Amboseli National Park, succeeding to the Kenya Wildlife Service - 2024), African Wildlife Foundation, Kimana-Tikondo Group Ranch, International Fund for Animal Welfar
Other actors : Lumo Conservancy, David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, World Wildlife Fund Kenya, Save the Elephants, Tsavo Trust, Kenya Wildlife Service
Type of financing (carbon credit, public/private grant, philanthropy...) : Grant (USAID), public/private (the Tanzanian Wildlife Protection Fund intended to create high profile projects to meet local needs funded for the management of the reserve, activities aimed at promoting elephant tourism in the region…)
Corridor action interruptions : agricultural activities, high-speed railway passage and other infrastructure projects, human settlements, fences, charcoal burning…
Main obstacles to action and threats (short-, medium- and long-term) :
:
The Amboseli - Mkomazi Tsavo corridor is one of the most vulnerable corridors in the region due to poaching, trafficking and human activities that threaten the biodiversity of flora and fauna. Indeed, the main threats to conservation connectivity in the Tsavo-Mkomazi ecosystem are the increasing human population, settlements, agricultural expansion, land subdivision, livestock overgrazing/degradation, the destruction of wetlands and woodlands, fences, water extraction, charcoal burning, poaching and bush-meat consumption, and human-wildlife conflicts.
High-density settlements and the spread of small-scale farming around the Tsavo West and the Chyulu NPs are threatening to block migratory routes to and from the two parks. The same is true of areas around the Taita and Rukinga Hills, where human settlements and activities, along with fences, have blocked the direct connection between the Tsavo East and Tsavo West NPs, curtailing the movement of elephants. Loss of forest cover on the upper Chyulu Hills, and farming and settlements on the lower slopes, are threatening to sever vital ecological links between the Tsavo West NP and the Amboseli ecosystem. Off-take of water draining from the Chyulu Hills is threatening habitat diversity in historically important drought refugees.
In an effort to mitigate human-wildlife conflicts in the Tsavo-Mkomazi ecosystem, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has overseen the construction of a number of electric fence lines at conflict hotspots along the Tsavo NP boundary. Such fences have in many cases proved effective in minimizing conflicts (crop damage, livestock predation, and injury or even death to humans) through containing ‘problem’ wildlife populations within protected areas. In most cases, however, delineation of the protected area boundaries did not take into account the full ecological needs of wildlife species, i.e. the extended dispersal areas and migration routes outside the narrow confines of the protected areas that most of the larger animals need in order to sustain their populations. At times of severe stress, mainly during periods of drought, fences may lead to the death of many animals, through denying them access to water and forage in the dispersal areas, while forcing them into degrading the habitats of the protected areas in which they are confined. Some animals, notably elephants, will break the fences, in their desperate quest to find water and forage.
Furthermore, the Standard Gauge Railway’s project split Kenya’s largest national park, the TsavoMkomazi National Park, between its eastern and the western part. This protected area is home to most of the country’s elephants, but by dividing it into two sections, it makes wildlife mobility on pre-existing corridor crossings difficult.
Finally, there is a lack of an integrated plan for the management of the corridor and its surrounding areas. Notably, in the Mkomazi Reserve area, research found that villagers had no information nor opportunities for contributing to planning and decision making of the reserve management (no platform for face to face dialogue between villagers and reserve officers for identifying problems and potential solutions). This resulted in complaints about the outreach projects in terms of poor completion rates and lack of transparency.
Bibliographical references for the action (documents, links, studies, articles) :
Promoting Tanzania's Environment, Conservation And Tourism (Protect), The Current Transboundary Initiatives For Combating Wildlife Trafficking: Best Practices And Recommendations For Improvement, J.R. Kideghesho and R.B. Lokina, January 2017
Homewood, K., Kiwasila, H. and D. Brockington. 1997. Conservation with Development? The Case of Mkomazi, Tanzania. Report to ESCOR of the Department of International Development. London, University College London.
Brockington, Daniel. “CONSERVATION, DISPLACEMENT AND LIVELIHOODS. THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE EVICTION FOR PASTORALISTS MOVED FROM THE MKOMAZI GAME RESERVE, TANZANIA.” Nomadic Peoples, vol. 3, no. 2, 1999, pp. 74–96. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43124089
Gordon O. Ojwang’, Patrick W. Wargute, Mohammed Y. Said, Jeffrey S. Worden, Zeke Davidson, Philip Muruthi, Erustus Kanga, Festus Ihwagi and Benson Okita-Ouma (2017). Wildlife Migratory Corridors and Dispersal Areas: Kenya Rangelands and Coastal Terrestrial Ecosystems
Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism (MNRT) 2022. Tanzania Wildlife Corridor Assessment, Prioritization, and Action Plan. Editors: Penrod, K., H. Kija, V. Kakengi, D.M. Evans, E. Pius, J. Olila and J. Keyyu. Unpublished report. Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism (MNRT), Dodoma. 155 pp. + Appendices
https://abcg.org/eventer/engaging-local-community-in-sustaining-the-large-population-of-elephants-in-tsavo-mkomazi-landscape-by-kenneth-kimitei-george-okwaro-awf-2/
https://www.kws.go.ke/content/tsavo-mkomazi-elephant-aerial-survey
https://www.savetheelephants.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/2013StatustrendsTsavoMkomazi.pdf
https://abcg.org/Strategies-for-Ensuring-Wildlife-and-Communities-Co-Existence/
Contact details : Dr. Shadrack Ngene, assistant Director, ecological monitoring and bioprospecting Kenya Wildlife Service, +254 719701911, sngene@kws.go.ke