Background

Building on our track record of developing management plans for several important protected areas in Eastern Africa, including the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and a number of Ethiopian parks, we were recruited by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the African Wildlife Foundation to help in the development and piloting of a new standardised management planning framework for application throughout Kenya’s protected areas system.

The main aim of this initiative was to enable KWS to carry out all their future protected area planning work in-house. This has several important benefits: it saves money spent on costly outside experts; it builds ownership of the new plans within KWS; and it ensures that all plans are produced to a consistent standard that all managers and headquarters staff are familiar with.

Our contribution

We set about documenting our planning knowledge in a straightforward and easy-to-use manual that described the key principles of protected area planning, the planning process to be followed, and the structure that all plans must adhere to. We then worked closely with KWS and other stakeholders to pilot the manual in the Meru and Tsavo Conservation Areas, and then updated the PAPF Manual based on the practical lessons learnt. In parallel, KWS established a new Planning Unit which worked with CDC on the pilot plans and which is now responsible for spearheading the development of management plans for other parks in the KWS estate. The project has helped reduce the costs of developing plans, strengthened KWS’ internal planning capacity, and increased the utility of planning as a tool for protected area management.

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