Our Landscape

We work in Kenya’s South Rift Valley, a bridge between the Maasai Mara and Amboseli. In this area, local Maasai communities have lived with their livestock alongside wildlife, forests, and grasslands, maintaining a landscape of exceptional biological and cultural diversity. This rangeland hosts one of the richest large mammal populations on earth, including both wildlife and livestock. This co-existence is enabled primarily by the communal and semi-nomadic form of local land use, which encourages mobility to ensure survival. Today, this is an increasingly threatened landscape, confronting a growing population, a culture in transition, and land use changes that threaten both wildlife and their livestock.

Our Approach

SORALO is a community-based and community-driven land trust established in 2004 to unite 16 Maasai communities in the management and security of their landscape. Our approach is founded upon two Maasai cultural concepts:

Enkop’ang | our good land, our common identity, our common pride

Erematare | stewardship and care over common resources

Our Role

Our primary role is to ensure the integrity of this landscape for the benefit of its people and wildlife. We work to help communities in this landscape secure rights to their land, develop management systems to keep the landscape healthy and intact, and create economic opportunities. We continue to develop innovative local conservation models that promote coexistence of people and wildlife, cultural and ecological conservation, and community empowerment.

Where we are

We work in Kenya's South Rift Valley, a Bridge between the Maasai Mara and Amboseli. In this area, local Maasai communities have lived with their livestock alongside wildlife, forests and grasslands maintaining a landscape of exeptional, biological and cultural diversity. This rangeland hosts one of the richest large mammal population on Earth, including both wildlife and livestock.

Programmes

Conserving
Coexistence

It is estimated that a significant proportion of Kenya’s wildlife is found outside of formally protected areas, mainly on community land. In the light of national declines in wildlife, community areas have become critical for biodiversity conservation across the country. The Maasai have lived with wildlife for centuries through their traditional semi-nomadic pastoral lifestyle, and what could be called a ‘culture of coexistence’.

Protecting Open Rangelands

Keeping pastoral rangelands open is core to achieving our vision of a healthy and intact landscape for people and wildlife. In fact, it is the underpinning of all of our work. We use a range of tools in order to tackle securing and strengthening community rights to their land, including assigning communities create Land Use Plans and other appropriate methods of securing communal land and resources. We further

Supporting Conservation
Livelihoods

The well being of people is central to the well being of the environment. By strengthening the livelihoods of Maasai people – whether that means pastoralism or new forms of enterprise – SORALO is supporting a culture of coexistence. Our work with conservation livelihoods involves strengthening the main local livelihood of pastoralism, supporting the development

Cultural
Leadership

The SORALO landscape is one of the last remaining strongholds of Maasai culture in Kenya. SORALO recognises the critical importance of the Maasai cultural values in enabling continued co-existence of people and wildlife within the landscape and we actively promote traditional knowledge, values and culture in ways that reinforce those values and assist their perpetuation in the face of social change. Aside from the

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Million Hectares

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People

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Scouts

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Maasai Communities

Reports & Publications

Strategic Plan 2018 - 2023

2018 Annual Report

2017 Annual Report

Journal of Arid Environments

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