GVI Kenya

Category: Community Conservation, Eco-tourism, Environmental Education, Human-Wildlife Conflict | Date: May 25 2009 | By: gvikenya

Every few months our team rides the rough, red dusty road through Tsavo West National Park, to the village of Kidong, a small but significant dot on the vast landscape that stretches between Tsavo West National Park across the border to Mt Kilimanjaro. We are aiming to support this community-based organisation for former poachers convert conflict with wildlife in to conservation.

The Kidong Education and Cultural centre is already teaching local farmers to protect their crops from elephants using chili peppers but they aspire to make the centre substitute income from poaching with a livelihood from hosting… tourists! On our most recent visit we worked with members of the community to bring together two of the skills we helped teach them previously; making soap from neem trees and paper from elephant dung. With one eye on the potential tourists we have been helping them develop their new found cottage industry of soap making in to a marketable product for tourists, experimenting with moulds and packaging made from recycled paper using elephant dung. With ex-poachers turning elephants from pests in to products, we hope the story behind the packaging will be enough to spark the interest of new customers!

The other side of the equation of course is bringing tourists to the centre in the first place and having already facilitated the collation of the people’s history, culture and evolving relationship with wildlife, we spent time developing a 15 minute presentation to kick off their cultural experience for the eco-toursits we will be targetting. There is still work to be done at the centre to get it ready for eco-tourism but we are also working behind the scenes on ways to get their restaurant built by the end of August.

Our new introduction to their ever-expanding repertoire of environmental sustainability was a workshop on the wonders of vetiver grass… this humble horticultural tool is being viewed as something of a miracle plant by those in the know. Tolerant of arid conditions, but able to cope with high rainfall, it is being used worldwide to stabilise soils against erosion, slow waterflow with its deep root system to ensure rains drain downwards rather than run-off and can be used as almost anything from livestock fodder to weaving mats and baskets. Using a strain that is infertile but propogates readily ensures its use can be controlled but easily expanded. So convinced were we by the benefits of the grass, that before leaving we planted 100 of them to get the community started!

And just to remind ourselves of why tourists should choose to visit Kidong on their safari stop off, the magnificent Mt Kilimanjaro appeared from behind a curtain of clouds and we found time to cool off in its refreshing (some might read ‘freezing’!) meltwaters at the idyllic Njoro springs.

 I look forward to reporting progress in a few months time,

 Corti

Tags: bush meat trade, capacity building, Eco-tourism, Elephants, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Kidong, Kilimanjaro, poachers, soil erosion, sustainabe development, tsavo west national park, vetiver grass, water conservation, wildlife

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Category: Community Conservation, Environmental Education | Date: Feb 03 2009 | By: gvikenya

Welcome back to GVI Kenya on tour! So cotton, bats and Njukini Women’s Group, what do they have in common? The truth is not much except that they all featured in our work here at Mahandakini today. Oh, and so did Kilimanjaro, treating us to some truly awe-inspiring views!

Cotton was one of our main themes with the community group we are working with here in Mahandakini. The WSPA community group, Mahandakini Youth Network for Animal Rights and Welfare
Have identified value added cotton production as a route to alternative liveloods that could guard against their 32 members returning to wildlife poaching and the bush meat trade. Cotton was widely grown here when there was a ready government market, being a hardy reliable cash crop in the semi arid strip between Tsavo West and Tanzania. But when the market disappeared, many farmers sought alternatives such as maize that is easy to sell, but more prone to the often failing rains.

Under a government initiative to revive cotton production, Dishon, the community group chairman has received training on spinning and weaving raw cotton as well as fabric dyeing, and is able to transfer those skills to his group and the wider community. Being able to source, spin, weave and sell the products of cotton locally would offer a realistic sustainable opportunity to provide a ready market to farmers and employment to the community. Profits from the enterprise would then feed in to their food security plans. At its most basic, food security for the community here means buying maize at harvest time when the price is low, storing it and selling back to the community at the same price at tougher times of year when the market price puts it out of financial reach for many families. This is not a profit making enterprise but a genuine community support process ensuring their neighbours don’t go hungry when traders force up the price of basic food stuffs.

Our morning with the community group was spent exploring both these initiatives, the planning, organisation and costs as a precursor to developing a fully fledged proposal, that could source the necessary funding to get them started.

The afternoon took us to neighbouring Chumvini village, where we have visited the bat caves at the primary school. Such wondeful animals it is always a thrill to see them up close and personal. On our last visit however we were dismayed to see that the school children didn’t share our respect and affection for the bats. After seeing them take out a number of bats with sticks we vowed to return and try to change attitudes. So with the gracious cooperation of the teachers, we took standard 8 - all 70 children! - for an hour’s lesson of games and bat facts, pressing home the benefit of bats, not least their remarkable ability to reduce mosquito populations! The ‘bat moth’ game at the end was designed to illustrate the concept of echolocation with a blindfolded ‘bat’ calling out and listening for the replying ‘moth’ until the bat catches the moth. Not sure how well they understood echolocation but they certainly enjoyed getting out of the classroom!

Finally we ended the day at the next village, Njukini where the women’s group gave us a tour of their grain store, sharing valuable information to take back to Mahandakini for their food security plans. This admiral group of local women that have been working as a cooperative for over 30 years were welcoming, gracious and as inspiring as their Kilimanjaro back drop! We were welcomed back to see them on our next visit to Mahandakini and personally I can’t wait to share an hour or two with this collection of women (and men - gender equality is alive and kicking even in dusty rural Kenya!) rich in shared experience, wisdom and sense of community.

Tags: bats, community development, cotton production, Environmental Education, food security, Kilimanjaro, Mahandakini, tsavo west, world society for the protection of animals

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Category: Community Conservation | Date: Feb 02 2009 | By: gvikenya

Hello from Mahandakini!

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology I’m blogging this week without even needing my laptop! The only drawback is that I can’t show you the wonderful photos that we’re getting along the way but if you bear with me I’ll illustrate our little safari when I’m back in the office.

So where am I this week? Well 2 years ago we begun a collaboration with the World Society for the Protection of Animals on their project to tackle the bush meat trade of Tsavo West national park. Recognising that the poachers of villages such as Mahandakini, Kidong and Kassani, near the town of Taveta were only hunting wildlife because they struggled to make a living from farming, the focus of their work is to work with community groups of reformed poachers and the women that helped sell the meat of wild animals to find alternative livelihoods.

Although a long way from our coastal home, we recognised the potential to help change people’s lives and the future of Tsavo’s wildlife.

This week I have brought our team back to Mahandakini, a beautiful rural village that lies between Tsavo West and the Tanzanian border, quite literally in the shadow of Mt Kilimanjaro - yes we really are that close to what must be one of the continents most iconic images and in my mind one the world’s most stunning vistas.

Our long bumpy journey yesterday took us through Tsavo West national park, past elephants with young, ostrich and hartebeest and with the sun setting a brief view of Kili’s twin peaks.

This morning we were guided by our ex-poacher hosts through their shamba, or farms, to see how irrigation can make all the difference in the world to these communities. During this week we will be supporting them in their plans to bring food security to their community, sadly a very poignant topic in Kenya right now, as well as plans to turn locally grown cotton in to value-added finished products.

I’ll let you know how the week goes as often as I can check in… And as long as my phone battery lasts!

Bye for now…

Tags: bush meat trade, Kilimanjaro, Mahandakini, taveta, tsavo west national park, wiliflife' poachers

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