Background

The Maasai Mara National Reserve is the best known and most visited wildlife area in Kenya, and is of outstanding global environmental importance because of the area's exceptional wildlife and habitats. The Reserve is the keystone of the broader Mara-Serengeti ecosystem, a 25,000km² expanse of savannah that spans the Kenya-Tanzania border and supports the world famous Serengeti-Mara wildebeest migration. The MMNR is, however, today faced by unprecedented challenges. These include escalating pressures from tourism development and growing visitor numbers, which are in turn causing a decline in the area’s tourism and environmental qualities, as well as rapidly changing land-uses in the wider ecosystem, such as uncontrolled tourism developments, expanding agriculture, and increased poaching and human-wildlife conflicts. The Reserve has lacked a comprehensive management plan for more than 25 years, which has severely hampered the efforts of Reserve managers to address the emerging challenges, and to secure vital financial resources, manpower and infrastructure. In response to the deteriorating environmental values and tourism product in the Reserve, the two county councils responsible for the MMNR decided to launch the development of a new 10-year MMNR management plan to provide a road map for building a sustainable future for the Reserve.

Our contribution

Having supported the development of the neighbouring Serengeti National Park general management plan, CDC was ideally placed to provide technical support for the development of the new MMNR plan. Working with managers and stakeholders, under the oversight of a Core Planning Team, CDC’s role included the facilitation of all stakeholder planning events, crafting the outputs of these events into the plan’s four management programmes, modelling the Reserve’s visitor use and projected revenue forecasts under alternative scenarios, and developing a zonation scheme with associated visitor use prescriptions designed to optimise the economic benefits provided by tourism alongside conservation of the area’s internationally-important biodiversity values. The process involved extensive stakeholder participation, and the new plan presents a consensus viewpoint on how this priceless natural and economic asset should best be managed and conserved in the future. The final draft management plan is currently under review by the relevant authorities prior to implementation.

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