Nelson Ole Reiya, Nashulai Maasai Conservancy, CEO, Kenya

For many of you who like to watch wildlife documentaries, you may have seen where I live on the border of Kenya and Tanzania where the Maasai Mara and Serengeti meet, where elephants roam, towers of giraffes stand proud, and wildebeest follow the timeless roots of the great migration.

This majestic homeland which we Maasai people share with wildlife is even the birthplace of our own species, it is the Rift Valley, the cradle of mankind!

We have to recognize the huge asymmetry in terms of climate impacts where the bottom 50% of the poorest people in countries contribute just about 10% of the carbon emissions but suffer 75% of the economic hardship.

Despite the ecological empathy the Maasai have living symbiotically with Mother Earth, they face a crisis.

Climate change is the cause of prolonged and unpredictable droughts; of the drying up of water tables; of the depletion and degradation of the lands upon which our livestock depend – the very same lands upon which wildlife depends; upon which our ways of life and our future depend.

The Maasai are turning into Climate Change warriors, by drawing the strength they in the past used to hunt lions.

Connected to that endeavor is the Story of community-led conservancy called Nashulai Maasai Conservancy, in Maasai Mara, Kenya.

As a boy, I grew up in the rich Savannah grasslands on the edge of the famed Maasai Mara National Reserve.

My boyhood land nourished both the teeming wildlife and our cattle and, in turn, provided food security to our communities.

But 30 years later, the land, which was once accessible to people, livestock, and wildlife, was affected by government policies and was subdivided into group ranches.

Due to poverty, many families, in turn, sold the land. We call such transactions ‘selling wealth to buy poverty’!

We knew we had to do something to save our land.

In 2016, we came together under the guidance of our Elders to create what we call a “an indigenous-led conservancy.”

Nashulai Maasai Conservancy was the very first Maasai-governed and directed Conservancy out of the 24 other conservancies in the Greater Mara Ecosystem.

Nashulai means a place of harmony where community and wildlife live in balance and mutual benefit.

We put in place a plan that follows the age-old practice of rotational grazing, opened up ancient wildlife corridors, removed fences and, in no time, nature recovered before our own eyes! Grassland regenerated, wildlife voted with their feet and returned in record numbers, moving again through the newly opened migratory corridors and ancient Elephant birthing nurseries.

Our conservancy demonstrates that local communities have the leadership and capacity to provide innovative solutions to preserve our threatened biodiversity. 

When the world was reeling under COVID, and when other larger, wealthier conservancies with outside leadership closed up, leaving their communities with nothing, against all odds, Nashulai provided food to over 1.1 million people from not just Nashulai but neighbouring conservancies as well, between May 2020 and March 2021. In doing so, not only did we stave off hunger and make it through the pandemic, as one, perhaps more importantly Nashulai won the trust and loyalty of Maasai communities all across the Maasai Mara region.

What I’m trying to tell you is that what is growing in the hearts of my people right now is not despair and not complacency and not even anger, but rather a collective will to rise together, to find solutions, to help one another, to draw on our ancestral knowledge. To use all of our wisdom and all of our courage and all of our experience coexisting with wildlife and mother nature in one of the world’s most precious places in order to find a way to sustain life on the land.

We are the proud winners of the UNDP/Equator Initiative Award in 2020 for leading in Innovative Nature-based Solutions.

And today, as I stand before you, Nashulai’s vision, inclusive land-use approach, and success, has captured the hearts and minds of fellow Maasai all across the Great Rift Valley. Maasai communities across southern Kenya, from the Maasai Mara all the way to the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro, an area of over 2 million acres, are rallying together to create history. To create perhaps the world’s largest equitable, indigenous conservation corridor that will also sequester carbon, and sustain Maasai on their land. That is how we are responding to the climate loss by providing nature-based solutions through the stewardship of our ancestral lands.

We are doing this for the future of our children, countless wild beings, and that of the planet.

The world cannot afford to turn indigenous people into conservation refugees. Our indigenous knowledge is crucial for biodiversity, health and food security. 

What is needed is enough trust and belief that communities like Nashulai are mobilizing for economic and social well-being.

The Maasai continue getting marginalized by tourism and conservation, for example in the misadventure of moving the Maasai in Tanzania out of the Ngorongoro area.

In Kenya the Maasai are facing a new threat in the form of climate colonialism.

A change of narrative and solutions are needed urgently to sustain the Maasai on their land.

The only missing piece is capital. Any seed capital that is entrusted to us will go a long way in mitigating our climate crisis while allowing our peoples to continue living on their ancestral lands with dignity and improved quality of life, and in harmony with nature.

The millions of dollars that goes to our part of the world goes to foreign conservation NGOs and not directly to indigenous people and local communities to create co-existence models like the Nashulai one. The funding systems that support fortress conservation and move out the Maasai from their ancestral land should stop.

Climate optimism cannot be the solution. What matters is what happens on community lands. Indigenous groups like the Maasai and others should have access to financial capital that helps them lead and guide the way forward in the climate crisis. Financial Capital should be disintermediated and de-colonized by putting it directly in the community’s hands.

The Maasai and other indigenous communities are simply calling for inclusion at the conservation table and not exclusion.

Thank you!