Nashulai Maasai Conservancy

The entire principle behind Nashulai is ensuring the benefits of conservation go to the community and indigenous people who have been its stewards for centuries. While all members benefit from revenue from land-lease payments, our scouts and rangers are further compensated as paid Nashulai staff. Community volunteers called the Nashulai Warriors for Wildlife Protection assist them in times of need. During the threat of desperation poaching during the Covid-19 pandemic dozens of young men volunteered to augment our scouts and rangers.

The biggest factor however is the strengthening and supporting traditional norms and sanctions against IWT. Convincing our and neighbouring communities that indigenous people can benefit from conservation and that changing several practices (for example Moran killing a lion as part of their initiation, retaliatory killing and poisoning of predators who kill our livestock, and logging for firewood) will benefit all communities in our interconnected Serengeti-Mara ecosystem has been the keystone of our success.

Another success we’ve had is hiring 4 rehabilitated poachers as scouts. By showing former poachers in our community that they have economic alternatives and that their skills can be used to benefit their communities and protect wildlife, instead of punishing and shaming them for their former activities, we have won them over to the side of conservation. Our scouts are unarmed as we prefer to engage with communities and known poachers instead of combating them with violence, and as we know who the poachers are, we can engage with the authorities if arrests are necessary.

By establishing Nashulai all landowners received lease-payments bringing most of our community financial stability for the first time. This also allowed us to establish a communal bursary fund where contributions from lease payments have funded post-primary education for 62 children to date. Through the financial stability brought to our residents from lease payments and working as staff, 60% of Nashulai households have been able to apply for microloans due to the economic stability our conservancy has brought them.

Nashulai also led to benefits from sustainable resource use and conservation for all residents through the creation of a sustainable grazing commons, allowing herders more space to range their livestock then their fenced in plots did. The restoration of our once degraded Sekenani River (a Mara River Basin headwater) benefited all our residents and livestock as much as it did wildlife. The establishment of Nashulai led to both safari tours paying to visit our land and the establishment of our own Nashulai Maasai Safari company that has brought more revenues to our community and funded more development projects that we collectively benefit from.

We also established the Nashulai Cultural Training Centre in 2019, providing so far 45 youth from throughout Maasai land with the skills needed for conservation management, scouting/guiding, hospitality, and community development training. By educating our youth to get higher paying and leadership positions in the conservation and tourism fields we are further empowering our people to reclaim stewardship of our land.

As a community led conservancy our residents stay on their land necessitating us to make life more compatible with conservation. As we tore down all 25km of fencing to reopen our land we lion-proofed our bomas and relocated several bomas located in the centre of the wildlife corridor into the villages inside Nashulai. We established protective fencing around our community and kitchen gardens to prevent HWC. We also modified our practice of retaliatory killing of predators that attack our livestock with a communal insurance system where Nashulai compensates residents who lost their livestock to predators financially. After re-establishing our mixed-use commons, we zoned the land so that the wildlife corridors were fully returned to wildlife, while the rest was designated for rotational grazing where all community members could graze their livestock in accordance to our schedule to prevent overgrazing.

We also supported our community in changing their breed from the South Asian zebu to the indigenous more sustainable and more valuable Boran breed, resulting in smaller but more valuable herds grazing in their native ecosystem. As this land is savannah these sustainable grazing practices helped restore its ecology faster than leaving it to nature would. We also helped members purchase sheep and chickens and establish communal and kitchen gardens at their bomas as a more sustainable source for livestock and food. As this land is savannah these sustainable grazing practices helped restore its ecology faster. To further reduce HWC and provide alternative incomes we created beekeeping cooperatives. Bees are a natural wildlife deterrent and as 70% of plant species in our ecosystem are pollinated by them, making them vital for restoring and maintaining our ecology.

As the core of our Nashulai Model of conservation rests on bringing benefits to the community, we’ve used the wealth generated by our conservancy to fund development projects. We’ve built 2 new schools and provide universal primary education to our residents. We constructed a piping system to provide all villages with potable water, which decreased infant mortality and waterborne diseases. We’ve provided the women in our community with entrepreneurship training and anti-female genital mutilation and anti-gender-based violence programming. 60% of our community’s families have applied for microloans and our gender parity bursary fund has provided 62 children with post primary school education.

During the Covid-19 starvation crises we fed not only our community of 3,000, but 25,520 in neighbouring communities up to 100km away including northern Tanzania, healthcare workers in Sekenani, and the rangers protecting the Maasai Mara National Reserve, providing them with hand sanitizers we could mass produce using our water system (as most lacked water for hand washing). We also provided sexual and reproductive health training to the girls in our community and started producing reusable menstrual pads as they lost access when schools closed due to lockdown.

The Covid-19 crisis also showed the overreliance that Maasiland has on the tourism sector as it makes up 90% of Maasai employment. It also showed us the effects of over tourism on wildlife as populations at Nashulai increased by 40% due to fewer tourists disturbing animals in the region (animals fleeing poaching nearby being a secondary factor). As such, we have been focusing on other non-tourism sources of income for our community including forming women’s beading co-operatives, cattle and livestock co-operatives, beekeeping co-operatives and tree planting co-operatives. To provide additional income and increased food security, we created 4 community gardens and helped 20 households establish their own kitchen gardens and poultry sheds. 50 beehives have also been set up to date.

Maasai culture has always had community ownership and stewardship of our land as an integral part of our worldview, and one that has only changed this past half century with the subdivision of land plots that are sold to outsiders and the increase in our peoples population. This has contributed to the problem of poaching in foreign owned wildlife centred conservancies as conservation refugees have lost the ownership and stewardship of their land and at times respond by poaching on what was once their land and their wildlife. As Nashulai is a community owned, centred, led, and managed conservancy this has been essential in our success in protecting and restoring our land and its wildlife, and having its most skilled warriors serve as our scouts and rangers. It's also what inspired our community of 3,000 to completely mobilize to combat the effects of the Covid-19 crisis, from feeding and mass-producing sanitizer for over 25,000 of our neighbours, to dozens of our youth volunteering to support our scouts force. Through the mobilization of our community not only could we create Nashulai in 2016 but save it, our neighbours and our wildlife from starvation and desperation poaching in 2020.

In addition to their role in protecting wildlife, our scouts and rangers serve as the primary educators in our community on the importance of conservation. An important aspect of their work is providing guidance on the importance of biodiversity and the impact of ecological degradation - encouraging garbage collection, hygiene and ecologically sustainable living. We have included conservation modules rooted in Maasai culture in our primary schools and at our Nashulai Cultural Training Centre conservation is a core course component for our conservation management, scouts and guiding programs.

Our community also gains awareness and a first hand education through active participation in conservation related projects such as reforestation, river restoration, community water monitoring, community and kitchen gardens, and sustainable grazing. For the reforestation, gardens and grazing projects, learning how to reduce HWC is part of the project curriculum.