Conservation and Community

The Greater Maasai Mara and the neighbouring Community landscape plays a major part of Kenya’s tourism industry. Its biodiversity, particularly its wildlife, is threatened by habitat fragmentation and degradation, human-wildlife conflict, and poaching to some extent for the selling of trophy parts such as ivory and skin.
The Maasai people are the main inhabitants of the area and their primary source of income is derived from livestock, and increasingly from agriculture. Both livelihoods, as currently practised, are unsustainable, in terms of both natural resource degradation and the extent to which they conflict with the natural movements of wildlife.
In particular, wildlife is heavily persecuted due to the damage they inflict on livestock and crops hence the need to diversify livelihoods away from both pastoralism and agriculture towards sustainable management of natural resources and other conservation-related activities, so that both wildlife and the Maasai may continue to co-exist in greater harmony and the ecosystem can be restored to health, providing critical ecosystem services, robust against climate change.