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By Annonciata BYUKUSENGE
Women from Loitoktok, KAJIADO County in Masai region of Kenya are determined to become saviors of wildlife by reporting poaching and trade of bush meat from Amboseli National park to concerned authorities.
The women’s commitment comes after understanding the importance of wildlife in their life.
Elizabeth Ngeiyoshimana, is one of the women, focused on combating poaching and trade of bush meat.
“In our savanna region we haven’t other things we can do for money except agriculture activities to develop our households.
The Masai community can’t eat bush meat, but are doing it as a business with people from Tanzania or Kenyan by exporting them outside of the country,” she said.
She added that recently the authorities from WWF-Kenya and Big Life Foundation visited the women in order to educate them about the role of wildlife conservation in their life and bow they can manage it.
The measure was taken after getting information that the Masai community is poaching animals in Amboseli National park and selling the bush meat.
According to Ngeiyoshimana, many years ago, they used to kill the animals for traditional culture.
“We use the animal skin in our traditional medicine, in design of some domestic tools and sell them. These activities were targeting simple animals, but for big animals like elephants, our husbands poached them for business. They are also killed because they destroy our plants and as they so endanger our children as they go to school.” she said.
Challenges
The main challenge, the women say, is that the elephants damage their farms and kill their domestic animals like cows, goats and sheep.
Sinyok Maninai, a farmer in Masai village said that, “Even we are in dry season, the elephants destroyed our plants, now this results into loss of our farm production. The government and private organisation tried to compensate us, but is not enough because they don’t count the value of each loss, they only estimate.”
She added that their children are recording low grades in class due to late reporting to school as a result of the wild animals that scares them and prevent from attending school.
Despite these challenges, the women continue to contribute to wildlife conservation saying the challenges are different from 20 years ago.
They say that now they have different organisation they can report to anytime they find a poacher in park.
“We praise the Lord, because in that period we lost many things and some of us lost their kids killed by animals. Now we are safe because of policies and measures put in place in order to protect wildlife,” Maninai said.
Gladys David is a woman from KAJIADO County in Masai region.
She focused on the awareness about the women’s role in wildlife conservation.
“Because of water scarcity in our region, we travel about 40 km to the water reservoirs in Park. Before receiving training from Big Life, WWF Kenya, Conservancy and Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) on wildlife conservation, we would see people hunting animals and keep silent because we thought it is our traditional culture,” Gladys said.
That behavior has changed, she witnessed:” when we see the hunters inform the relevant authorities because they have the technology to tack where the animals are and if they are in trouble. The authorities immediately come to see and hunters’ get prosecuted and punished by the courts.”
Daniel Ole Sambu the coordinator, Predator Compensation Fund at Big Life Foundation in Kenya highlighted the effort they put in awareness and wildlife protection in the community in order to end wildlife illegal trade.
“In Masai they don’t poach animals for meat, but for traditional culture and business into the country or outside. We started to become aware that they are doing bush meat illegal trade. There is a step that has been reached because many people have changed their mindset and some of them are rangers in different areas to protect wildlife from poaching,” Daniel said.
Speaking about the loss of kids due to wildlife animals, he said that they build different infrastructures at schools in order to protect kids from attack.
“Before 2010, the animals would attack kids at school because they used to sit around in the park, there wasn’t buildings such as class, toilet and other basic infrastructure at school. Now we built classrooms, toilet, water tanks and others at school in order to protect kids,” he said.
Amboseli National Park (formerly Maasai Amboseli Game Reserve), is in southern Kenya.
It was established in 1974.
It’s known for its large elephant herds and views of immense Mount Kilimanjaro, across the border with Tanzania.
Observation Hill offers panoramas of the peak and the park’s plains and swamps.
Other Various wildlife species include giraffes, zebras, cheetahs and hundreds of bird species.
The western section is dominated by vast Lake Amboseli, which is dry outside the rainy season.
The park is 39,206 ha (392.06 km2) in size at the core of an 8,000 km2 (3,100 sq mi) ecosystem that spreads across the Kenya-Tanzania border.
