Northern Kenya’s Conservancies: When Wildlife Pays Better Than Cattle

By Safari News — Africa Calling Safaris, Partner desk, Nairobi · 24/10/2025

Updated 23 October 2026

Northern Kenya’s arid, sparsely visited rangelands have become the setting for one of Africa’s more notable conservation turnarounds. Since the 1980s and 1990s, when poaching and land conflict devastated wildlife here, a community-conservancy model has helped reverse the decline across territory used by semi-nomadic Samburu, Rendille and Borana pastoralists. The approach rests on a simple economic shift: communities earn more from live wildlife and tourism than from livestock grazing alone.

The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), founded in 2004, now coordinates 43 member conservancies spanning 8.4 million acres across 11 counties, an area larger than any single Kenyan national park. The movement began with Il Ngwesi in 1996, regarded as East Africa’s first community-owned wildlife conservancy. NRT conservancies employ roughly 3,000 community rangers and have recorded Grevy’s zebra increases of about 44 percent between 2010 and 2024, alongside elephant and lion recoveries across much of the network since 2012.

Revenue from safari camps operating inside conservancy boundaries is distributed directly to landowner households, typically 30 to 50 percent, with additional funds supporting schools, clinics and water projects. Camps are small, generally six to sixteen guests, with off-road driving, night drives and village visits forming part of the experience; vehicle numbers per wildlife sighting are far lower than in mainstream parks.

For travellers routing from Europe or the Caucasus, northern Kenya conservancies pair naturally with a Nairobi stopover and a Masai Mara extension, offering a quieter, community-run counterpart to the southern safari circuit.

Based on reporting by Safari News, the travel desk of Africa Calling Safaris (Nairobi), GTour’s partner for East Africa. Read the original there.