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in this case a growing human population and inadequate space or resources for dry-season 

 grazing, forcing people (people who were living on the edge of survival anyway) into critical 

 wildlife habitat. A good percentage of the locally available graze for wildlife species was 

 instead consumed by domestic animals, threatening a senous decline. If I could combine all the 

 environmental problems cf Africa into one case, this would be very close. 



AWT initially addressed the problem by appointing a Maasai project officer to identify, along 

 with the Kenyan Wildlife Conservation and Management Department, exactly who was grazing 

 in the park, and how to encourage them to go elsewhere. Far from grand schemes to share park 

 receipts or the like, the first few years of Kenyan community conservation involved attending 

 community meetings. We tried to tease out the fundamental issues behind the problem, and at 

 the same time build a certain amount of credibility among the Maasai. We knew that, without 

 this gradual building of a solid foundation, without the confidence of the Maasai that the Kenyan 

 government was committed to finding solutions, that the project was doomed. We found that the 

 problem centered around deeper issues, like the lack of access to markets for Maasai sheep and 

 goats, and government land -use policies that threatened the traditional, community-oriented 

 ownership pattern. 



After establishing stable links with the community, through Community Conservation 

 Committees and key leaders in all project areas, solutions became easier to implement. It 

 became possible to talk about increased tourism In the Maasai area, to share the benefits. It 

 became easier to find markets, and to develop them. In the end, herders in the Park made a 

 decision based on their own interest to remove their livestock. That situation prevails today, 

 though the herders once asked for and received permission to graze in the Park during a 

 particularly dry stretch, and there have been a few problems with enforcement. 



This was all before the current COBRA project began. The simple but profound changes 

 brought about by the original project made it possible to think about broader, policy-level issues, 

 questions aboit the way the Kenyan government dealt with rural resource use. With money 

 from USAID, AWF, several other organizations, and the Kenya Wildlife Service began a five 

 year push to create a community wildlife program. The Wildlife Service came into existence 

 wuh the promise to share revenues from protected areas with neighboring peoples. But how to 

 accomplish this goal within a stable infrastructure, with competing claims and rivalries between 

 communities among many other hurdles, was and is a true challenge. Merely distributing cash 

 made little sense, since it would have been prohibitively expensive to administer. In the end, 

 with the assistance of a Maasai project officer employed by AWT, all sides agreed to put the 

 money into community-suggested projects. Basic community development work became tied to 

 the success of the park. It was a simple idea decades old, but so hard to express in real terms, 

 in real settings, that it took years of building just to produce a foundation. Now, with the new 

 Community Wildlife Service institutionalized within the Kenya Wildlife Service, we are free to 

 think about better revenue- sharing arrangements. We can address the human issues behind 

 wildlife decline as a matte r of rou tin e business This is where we hoped we'd be when we 

 started. 



