I was fortunate to attend a week-long training course facilitated by Francine Madden of the Human-Wildlife Conflict Collaboration. The training was held at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy and I am very grateful to the Denver Zoological Foundation for funding to attend the training.
We were a large diverse group that attended, from all over the world. The East African contingent was huge! There were representatives from Uganda and Tanzania and a large group from northern Kenya.
We learned a lot about mediation, conflict resolution and conflict mapping over the week and used many local examples to put it all into context. It became clear to us that Human-Wildlife conflict is more about conflict between people and we learned many ways in how to address this.
Overall, it was a fantastic training course and I was excited to return to Samburu to practice what I had learned. We also teamed up with Grevy’s Zebra Trust (GZT) and shared our experience and knowledge with our field teams and Westgate Community Conservancy.
Working on a conflict case.
The Ubuntu-Mtetezi group in Ol Pejeta.
Our teams in Samburu practice their conflict mapping.
Stephen from Westgate and Peter from GZT role-play a conflict case.