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Livelihoods Programme (Ufugaji Hifadhi) - Kenya Wildlife Trust

The goal is to empower farmers with fair wages, enabling them to achieve financial independence. By doing so, they become more resilient to the adverse effects of climate change and less likely to resort to harmful measures that jeopardize wildlife and the land’s protection.

KWT and KWCA are collaborating on this initiative to drive a holistic solution that will educate farmers using a virtual marketplace on how to farm more sustainably and help deliver to them financial independence through fair wages so they are more resilient to adverse climate impacts, and therefore less likely to breach protective measures to protect wildlife and the land.

Livestock production is adversely affected by ecosystem degradation and faces increased competition for resources from other sectors. Additionally, increasing temperatures and intense, short bursts of heavy rainfall reduce yields of rangelands, leading to overgrazing, food insecurity, and conflict over scarce resources (including between humans and wildlife, such as big cats that KWT seeks to protect).

Ufugaji Hifadhi aims to give farmers a fair wage and a sustainable income from selling healthy livestock and livestock products. It also engages farmers in sound pasture management practices and restoring degraded landscapes in the Greater Mara Ecosystem.

Using an app to give pastoralists access to a value chain that offers incentives to improve the quality of their livestock produce and direct access to a new market, can maximize the sale value.

This project kicked off with inception and livestock a route mapping workshop held in November 2021, at G&G in Talek. Talek was selected due to its centrality in the Maasai Mara landscape hence ease of access by all the participants. 

A total of twenty participants drawn from the different conservancies in the greater Mara ecosystem were selected and participated in the workshop. The participants included youth, women, livestock traders, and livestock drovers who engage in the livestock trade or understand better livestock market routes and dynamics. 

Field agents use smartphones (which can work offline and synchronize later in areas of poor mobile connectivity) so that individual farmers do not need their own hardware. Any farmer can therefore work with their local field agent to access the benefits of the virtual marketplace and if they do have basic SMS phones, then SMS alerts can also be sent to them.