Pastoralist livelihoods and wildlife revenues in East Africa: a case for coexistence?

Pastoralist livelihoods in transition in sub-Saharan Africa

The primary requirements for pastoralist production in ASAL are livestock, labour, and access to key grazing and water resources. Commonly favourable terms of trade for pastoral produce against grain make it possible for people to make a living selling milk or meat from even relatively low herd numbers (Swift 1986; Sikana et al. 1993). Despite long-term declines, and the effects of subsidised meat and milk products being dumped on African markets (e.g. The Economist 1993; Oxfam 2002), broadly favourable terms of trade still underpin successful pastoral economies (Zaal and Dietz 1999; Dietz et al. 2001; Zaal et al. 2006), although drought or epidemic can precipitate rapid collapse into famine (Homewood 2008). Physical remoteness from markets is often a major constraint (McPeak and Little 2006; McPeak et al. 2012), and transhumant movements may in part be dictated by market potential. Security issues, from periodic raiding to outright war,ⁱⁱ also constrain mobility, production and market access (Little 2003; McPeak and Little 2006, McPeak et al. 2012), as do disease and associated quarantine restrictions.

Within the pastoralist arena alone, there are numerous gender- and age-related livelihood activities around the pastoralist household enterprise, including animal husbandry, processing pastoral produce for home consumption or trade, livestock trade, politico-legal negotiation and physical enforcement of access to or exclusion from resources. Pastoralists almost always combine these livestock-focused occupations with complementary livelihood activities (Homewood 2008): farming, fishing, hunting and gathering, processing natural resources for sale, artisanal work, wage labour, salaried employment and/or investment in non-pastoral trade and businesses.

In East Africa, as elsewhere, pastoral areas including many Maasai communities in both Kenya and Tanzania continue to display wide and deep levels of poverty with respect to international and national rural poverty thresholds (Oxfam 2006; Kenya: Thornton et al. 2006, Boone et al. 2011; Tanzania: Tenga et al. 2008). Poverty is compounded by adverse policy and by biophysical disaster. As herd sizes per capita and range areas dwindle, as access to and movement between key resources become limiting and pastoralist options are more constrained, people increasingly depend on non-livestock elements of their multi-stranded livelihoods (Galvin 2009). Diversification of both poor and wealthy pastoralists may be into farming cf. (Mace 1993), but in ASALs, cropping is commonly so risky and yields so low that only the poorest derive much of their living from farming, with wage labour, remittances and trade (from petty vending to full-fledged businesses) often more salient sources of income (Homewood et al. 2009). Pastoralist diversification has tended to be treated as a special case (Little et al. 2001) but can be seen as a particular strand within the widely observed de-agrarianisation of African rural livelihoods (Bryceson and Jamal 1997). Households diversify through necessity, through risk management, and (for the most well-off) to build a portfolio of investment that goes well beyond, while still encompassing, pastoralist production and trade (Homewood et al. 2009). People, money and produce continually move between multi-local households. The rural part of the family may manage herds and crops in different sites with different agro-ecological potentials. Farming and livestock may operate as wealth store and investment for urban members' wages; meanwhile, rural households share farm produce with town-dwelling kin (Homewood et al. 2009; see also Iliya and Swindell 1997). Town-based wage earners may send remittances, and host children attending school or sick people attending hospital. Some pastoralists are able to intensify, using supplements, veterinary inputs, fodder crops, tighter integration of farming and livestock, ‘improved’ high-yielding (but drought- and disease-prone) breeds and more market-oriented models of production. For example, better-off herd owners may buy up poorer families’ young male calves and vaccinate them, enhancing survival and rearing a much higher proportion to commercially valuable size (Homewood et al. 2006).

What is the role of wildlife-based incomes in this complex tapestry of pastoralist livelihoods? Diversification and intensification mean increasingly sedentary life ways that allow access to farm work, jobs, markets, schools and hospitals, but impact adversely on livestock mobility, performance and production. Two crosscutting trends make pastoral production harder: land fragmentation (and land alienation) constraining mobility, and climate change, which is expected to make mobility even more crucial (Galvin 2009; Davies and Nori 2008). Alone among the many potential pathways of diversification outlined above, wildlife-based activities commonly promote more open rangelands theoretically consistent with mobile pastoralist production strategies. With wild grazers and domestic livestock depending on the same key resources, and pastoralists using mobility and migration strategies that closely parallel those whereby wildlife make the most of patchy and unpredictable grazing and water, there are synergies to be found. However, the overlap also potentially makes for competition and tradeoffs between wildlife and pastoralist land uses.

Tensions around tradeoffs are intensified by policy. Kenyan and Tanzanian governments see pastoralist livestock management (mobile transhumance on unfenced, unmodified rangelands) as unproductive and environmentally damaging e.g. (URT 1997; MoLF. 2006). Pastoral migration to south Tanzania is perceived, without good data, to be driven by pastoralists' own degradation of their rangelands (Brockington 2006). Regional and district governments impose draconian confiscations of cattle and fines, constraining pastoral activities while benefiting from their productivity. In contrast to the generally negative official take on mobile pastoralism, wildlife tourism is portrayed by these same agencies as an environmentally and economically sustainable means for pastoral groups to diversify, generate revenues and improve well-being. These schemes almost invariably aim for wildlife activities to replace pastoralism through a part of its range, and thus, for the two to coexist alongside one another, rather than overlapping fully within the same space (as was originally intended to be the case for multiple land use areas like the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and as is envisaged for buffer zones around protected areas).

Wildlife, tourism, conservation and development in East Africa

Conservation is big business in East Africa. Tourism is regularly among the top three contributors to GDP and to foreign exchange earnings in Kenya, accounting for USD 884 million in 2010 Kshs 73.7 billion; (Ministry of Tourism2010). Despite the global financial crisis, Tanzania earned USD 1.16 billion from tourism in 2009 (The Tanzania National Website 2009). In both countries, tourists are strongly drawn by the appeal of wildlife alongside other attractions. Conservationists see tourists' dollars as one of the principal means to generate meaningful income for the rural poor (Roe et al. in press). Government policies (URT 20022005; UNDP/UNEP/IIED/IUCN/WRI 2005), conservation NGO projects (AWF 2005), entrepreneurial initiatives (Nelson 2004; Lewa Wildlife Conservancy 2010) and research publications (Pearce and Moran 1994; Hutton et al. 2005) all promote wildlife-based tourism. Maasailand, the region of Kenya and Tanzania dominated by Maa-speaking pastoralists, is a hotspot of conservation, poverty and new initiatives to redistribute tourist income and is a good place to explore dynamics and distribution of revenues.

In Kenya, Maasailand and other pastoral areas represent among the fastest growing tourism destinations (33% growth in bed-nights 2004 to 2005; Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife 2006). In Tanzania in 2009, 16 National Parks earned USD 43.8 million; Ngorongoro Conservation Area, USD 22.6 million; and tourist hunting, USD 14.9 million (The Tanzania National Website 2009). In both Kenya and Tanzania, the highest earning protected areas are situated within, and effectively excised from, Maasailand (Figure 1), as is a high proportion of the two countries’ conservation estate overall. Parts of Kenyan Maasailand have shown rapid economic growth driven by wildlife conservation, rising domestic and export markets for crops and rising land values (Norton-Griffiths and Said 2010).

However, the wildlife populations are in drastic and well-documented decline. Kenya's long-term aerial count datasets show that there has been a 50% to 80% decline in numbers of the vast majority of wildlife species since counts began in the mid-1970s (Ottichilo et al 2001; Homewood et al. 2001; Western et al. 2006 2009; Ogutu et al. 2011). This decline is as marked within as around protected areas (Western et al. 2006). Though data for other East African regions are less complete, and declines seem less apparent in Tanzania (Homewood et al. 2001), similar trends are emerging (Sinclair et al. 2008). For example, Stoner et al. (2007) collated 1980s to early 2000s aerial census data for large herbivore populations in eight large census zones in Tanzania. Of those that showed significant changes, most declined. Thomson's gazelle, Grant's gazelle, hartebeest, reedbuck, roan antelope, sable antelope, warthog and zebra declined in over 50% of the zones where they were surveyed, though elephant and giraffe generally fared well across the country. Around Tarangire, elephants are increasing, while wildebeest are declining (Sachedina 2008).

These declines have taken place despite heavy investment in wildlife management and conservation by governments and international conservation NGOs (Norton-Griffiths 2007; Scholfield and Brockington 2009). There are a number of possible causes of wildlife decline, which can be categorised using Diamond's ‘evil quartet’ of factors driving species extinctions. These are habitat loss, introduced species (including disease), overhunting (by human or non-human predators) and secondary extinctions (following the prior extinction of organisms on which the species under consideration depends). In the case of East African wildlife, each of these factors has been shown to apply to some extent for individual species in individual sites. For example, in Serengeti and Ngorongoro, temporary local extinction of wild dog and a drastic decline in lion populations were both caused by an outbreak of canine distemper (Sinclair et al. 2008, page 3). Across Africa, rhinoceros are perennially vulnerable to illegal hunting. Some rhino subspecies are thought to be locally extinct in a number of sites, and others have been hunted to near-complete or complete regional extinction across East Africa (Sinclair et al. 2008), page 39; (Milliken et al. 2009). On Laikipia Plateau in Kenya, predator increases associated with private conservancies and their interplay with livestock ranching are thought to have driven down wild herbivore numbers in ways that impact unevenly across numerically dominant as opposed to relatively less numerous species (Georgiadis et al. 2007). More generally, decades of ecological research have shown that forage scarcity, predator pressure, outbreaks of disease and other factors acting whether singly or in concert have all limited the populations of individual East African savannah herbivores (Sinclair et al. 2008). However, both at the global level (Lambin and Meyfroidt 2011; Mace et al. 2005) and more specifically in Kenyan and other East African rangelands (Western et al. 2009), habitat loss is increasingly emerging as the most salient cause of species decline. The marked synchronous decline of regional populations of over 40 large mammal East African savanna species between 1975 and the present day, while exacerbated by the interplay of numerous individual factors, is likely to be driven primarily, though not exclusively, by loss of habitat through land fragmentation and conversion to cultivation. Species decline across the board around Mara, and across Kenya more generally (Western et al. 2009), has been linked to proliferation of large-scale commercial cultivation on the one hand (Homewood et al. 2001), and of smallholdings on the other (Lamprey and Reid 2004), along with subdivision and fencing off of private plots within formerly communal open rangelands (Nkedianye et al. 2009). These changes make it increasingly difficult for wildlife, as well as livestock, to access grazing and water, and to move between key dry and wet season resources.

Economic analyses suggest that the relatively poor contribution of wildlife to landowner-entrepreneurs and the considerably greater returns per unit area from commercial crops influence choices to convert land to large-scale cultivation (Norton-Griffiths et al. 2008; Norton-Griffiths and Said 2010). Around Mara, households making the most from conservation revenues were also those investing most in commercial cultivation in ways not compatible with sustainable conservation (Thompson et al. 2002). Besides owner-entrepreneurs, nation states such as Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania are increasingly leasing very extensive areas of rangelands to foreign entrepreneurs and states for large-scale cultivation of biofuels and food crops for export (Zoomers 2010), suggesting that for these states, the returns from leasing out rangelands for cultivation outweigh the combined use values and intrinsic values of wildlife.

Similar considerations may be just as important in local smallholders' livelihoods choices. However, as well as direct economic benefits, land conversion is also driven by the local people's strategies for securing what is otherwise weak land tenure in rangelands. This is because rangelands may constitute key seasonal grazing areas but are seen by states as unproductive and unused, and therefore as available for alienation (Sachedina 2008; Thompson and Homewood 2002; Thompson et al. 2009). As well as economic and tenure strategies, people have taken up cultivation because of state pressure to grow crops, with countries such as Tanzania holding up farming (and the land conversion that inevitably accompanies it) as a national ideal, continually emphasised through the school system and the media (Bishop 2007).

Given the evidence for habitat loss as driver of species decline and for the salience of economic incentives encouraging land conversion, we ask to what extent wildlife revenues contribute to pastoralist livelihoods and whether this translates into a robust basis for coexistence. To put the role and importance of wildlife- and tourism-based activities into context, we outline and draw upon findings from a multi-site study of livelihoods in Kenya and Tanzania Maasailand for detail of methods, (see Serneels et al. 2009, and individual case study sites in Homewood et al. 2009). The analysis we present below of pastoralist livelihoods around protected areas is a step towards exploring how conservation needs and pastoral goals might be reconciled, and coexistence made a more sustainable possibility.

Livestock

Pastoral production accounted for well over half of the mean income for the pooled samples in each site (Figure 1). While most (91% to 100%) households had livestock, a significant proportion in each site had too few to support household members fully. Most animals were concentrated in the hands of a few, with the top 10% to 20% households owning half to two-thirds of all livestock across all sites (Table 1).

Reliance on non-livestock income was therefore a necessity for most, especially for the poorest, quite apart from being a potentially positive investment option for the well-off. Nonetheless, in each site, across all different wealth categories and across most livelihood strategies, people were actively purchasing livestock. Poor households continued to seek to rebuild their herds, while better-off households continued to invest in new animals.

Farming

Farming was widely practised. Maasailand is mostly semi-arid, and most households had limited access to agro-ecologically favourable sites. In four out of the five study areas, >50% of households farmed (Kitengela 68%, Amboseli 57%, Longido 67%, Tarangire 88%; see Figure 2). In Mara, only 13% households cultivated.

However, yields were generally poor and contributed little to overall incomes. In Mara, Longido and Kitengela, >50% of the households that farmed harvested nothing. Amboseli yields were variable; again, many households failed to harvest. Crops accounted for just 2% of the mean total income in Mara, 8% in Kitengela, 12% in Tarangire, 14% in Amboseli and 21% in the poorest site, Longido.

Farming contributed to livelihood security on several levels. In addition to the benefits for food security and opportunities for commercial cropping in some sites (Mara, Tarangire), cultivation has been an effective means of staking claim during land privatisation and subdivision e.g. Kenya, Mara; (Thompson et al. 2009), and countering protected area expansion e.g. Tanzania, Tarangire; (Sachedina and Chenevix Trench 2009).

Both direct observation and remotely sensed land cover analyses showed extensive large-scale commercial cereal cultivation in the outer ring of former group ranches around the Maasai Mara National Reserve (MMNR). However, both the proportion of households involved in commercial cultivation and its total acreage dropped significantly between 1998 and 2004 with the completion of land titling across most of the area studied and more recently with the rise of conservancy agreements across the former group ranches immediately adjacent to MMNR (Bedelian in press). Alongside poor rainfall and declining soil fertility, the transaction costs of dealing with multiple smallholders (as opposed to dealing with the group ranch committee for large areas) made large-scale farming in Kenya Maasailand difficult.

Large-scale cereal farming had also spread around Tarangire. Maize cultivation was a lucrative possibility for households able to invest in mechanised farming (Sachedina 2008). However, opportunities for such large-scale farming were not widespread elsewhere. In the poorest site, Longido, with the highest proportion of households farming, former village-owned high-potential lands on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro (east of Longido town) had long since been leased by the state to outside investors (Chenevix Trench et al. 2009).

Off-farm activities

Half or more households (50% to 85%) earned off-farm income from petty trade, business, wages or salaried income and remittances (Figure 2). Returns from casual unskilled work are a fraction of those for regular jobs as teacher, driver or government official. Potentially large but ephemeral income streams from gemstone mining and brokerage, and land leasing, tended to be seen as secondary in importance to livestock and other economic activities. Off-farm work accounted on average for 8% Mara, 20% Amboseli, 30% Tarangire, 34% Longido and 43% Kitengela income - second only to livestock in most sites, other than Mara (Figure 2). Earnings from off-farm work are particularly salient in two sites: the poorest site Longido (where the poorest households depend entirely on off-farm income or remittances; Figure 3) and peri-urban Kitengela, where there are increased opportunities for such work. This bears out analyses emphasising the need for off-land work and the willingness of pastoral peoples to pursue these activities e.g. Sandford 2006; Boku 2008; Galvin 2009; McPeak et al. 2012).

Wildlife-related income

There are wildlife-based initiatives in all sites and in most cases, established protected areas too (Table 2). In principle, there are multiple channels whereby local people may derive income from wildlife-related activities. These divide into returns at community level and those which come direct to the household or individual. Possible wildlife-related income streams differ between Kenya and Tanzania, and between different sites within countries.

In Kenya, MMNR gate fees flow to the Narok County Council with a proportion translating into community development. In some sites, a proportion of gate fees earned by other protected areas (national parks, Ngorongoro Conservation Area) are also said to be channelled to community development (but often with little transparency or accountability; see e.g. Sinclair et al. 2008, pages 452 to 454). Returns at the community level are supposed to translate into improvements in health, education, transport and other community facilities though they may be dissipated through poor central, district- or community-level governance, elite capture or outright corruption (Thompson and Homewood 2002; Sachedina 2008). In some cases, tour companies pay contractors directly to carry out village-approved improvements (Sachedina and Chenevix Trench 2009). In both Kenyan and Tanzanian sites, some individuals received bursaries for education or medical treatment either through community board decisions (Thompson and Homewood 2002) or direct from tour operators (Sachedina and Chenevix Trench 2009).

However, with land privatisation around Mara and Kitengela in Kenya, former community-based organisations (e.g. wildlife associations formerly congruent with group ranches around Mara) have largely ceased to function. Instead, they have given way to one-on-one, standardized land lease deals between individual landowners and conservancy enterprises around Mara, and conservation easements around Kitengela. Some landowners have privately owned tourist campsites on their land (Thompson et al. 2009).

In Tanzania, bed-night payments, concession fees and contributions from game viewing or hunting companies could originally be paid directly into village accounts for social development projects, but the new regulations for wildlife management areas (WMAs) mean that these monies are intercepted at the level of central government (Sachedina and Chenevix Trench 2009). Wildlife-related income has in the past been used on occasion at village level to offset cesses (village-level taxes) in Tanzania. This created positive but arguably invisible impacts on household income, in that these community-level effects are not captured by household survey. However, where data were available, it was clear that village-level benefits were easily captured by local elites and were not having the broader impacts on livelihoods that could influence household decision-making in favour of conservation-compatible land use (Sachedina 2008; Nelson et al.2009).ⁱⁱⁱ

Household surveys in all sites focused on income streams coming to individuals within the household. Wildlife-related income was recorded to include activities that would otherwise be categorised as returns from business or salaries but which would not be available as opportunities without the wildlife (Serneels et al. 2009). Some individuals secured employment as labourers or guides e.g. (Sachedina and Chenevix Trench 2009), as community scouts monitoring set-aside areas (e.g. Kitengela; Nkedianye et al. 2009), and as Kenya Wildlife Service rangers (Thompson and Homewood 2002; Thompson et al. 2009). Some individuals derived income from tourist-oriented activities, such as cultural boma performances, sales of beadwork, jewellery and other craftwork. In at least one site, some villagers had received payment for facilitating illegal hunting, though such activities could not be systematically researched through household survey.

To summarise, compared with the universal engagement with livestock and the widespread involvement with farming and off-farm work, only a small proportion of households received wildlife earnings in most sites (3% to 14%). Averaging across those households which do derive income from wildlife, amounts were small in most sites, contributing <5% of the mean annual income (Figure 2).

While overall few Maasai households earn from wildlife, and the sums they make do not compare with main income streams from livestock, crops and off-farm sources, landowning households close to the MMNR saw real benefits from conservation-based enterprises. In contrast to the other sites, two-thirds (64%) of the households in Mara earned some income from wildlife, and wildlife conservation accounted for 21% of the mean annual income for Mara households in the sample (Figures 2 and 4). This is explored in more detail in the next section.

Conservation, wealth and poverty in Mara

MMNR is Kenya's highest-earning wildlife tourist destination, taking 15 to 20 million USD annually (Norton-Griffiths 2007). Numerous additional wildlife enterprises have grown up around Mara, with landowners^iv on the now-adjudicated, subdivided and privately owned former group ranch lands able to capture wildlife returns. There has been a rapid evolution of revenue-sharing institutions around Mara since the 1970s, from the initial 19% county council MMNR gate takings paid to group ranch wildlife associations; through post-group ranch, politically constituted wildlife associations; and most recently, conservancy partnerships between tourism investors and landowners (Thompson et al. 2009; Bedelian in press). The most recent conservancy agreements offer better security of income to landowners, through rent rather than bed-night payments. They require 5- to 15-year covenanting of the designated area, during which current resident households must move out. In covenanted areas, land sales, homestead construction, cultivation and fencing are excluded, as is grazing of livestock under most circumstances (Bedelian in press). Conservancy arrangements may offer a better deal for landowners (Thompson et al. 2009) and better conservation outcomes (Western et al. 2006). They remain to be evaluated in terms of implications for wildlife populations (Western et al. 2009), impacts on households forced to move by conservancy restrictions (particularly those relocating herds, and those who are non-landowners and who therefore receive no compensatory revenues), and impacts on receiving areas (Bedelian in press).

In Mara, wildlife revenue made up 15% to 30% of the mean household income across the wealth spectrum from the poorest quintiles to the best-off (Figure 4), second in importance only to livestock. However, the top 25% of Mara households by wealth consistently captured 60% to 70% of conservation income. The bottom 25%, by contrast, captured around 5%, rising to 15% if all forms of associated conservation-related employment are included. The middle 50% took around 25% of conservation-related income across the board. Despite significant changes in the volume of tourism returns between 1998 and 2004, there was minimal change in this pattern of distribution across wealth ranks. The poorest 20% of households were consistently more likely to be engaged in cultivation and/or off-farm work and significantly less likely to receive wildlife income than other households (Thompson et al. 2009).

The total volume of tourism returns in Kenya fell significantly between 1998 and 2004, probably as a result of the impact on tourism internationally of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. Tourism collapsed again in 2007 to 2008 following Kenya's post-election violence. In the pre-conservancy era 2004 Mara surveys, mean conservation incomes to households earning from what were then wildlife associations and campsites averaged just 25% of their 1998 value. Within that changing flow of revenue, the relative proportions captured by the wealthiest, middle and poorest Mara households stayed remarkably constant. However, between 1998 and 2004, proportions of households receiving income from wildlife associations fell from 55% to 37%. Overall, the proportion of households reporting income from the wildlife associations and campsites (which were the main wildlife-based initiatives at the time) dropped from 55% to 41%.

Despite inequalities, conservation earnings reached most households in the Mara sample, and returns at household level, while very variable, on average, made a significant contribution. However, comparison of Mara with the four other sites suggests that these benefits are linked to conditions rarely met elsewhere. MMNR is high-earning compared with other tourism destinations. The households sampled are predominantly those of present landowners situated close to the MMNR, who are able to command pay for game viewing or accommodation on their land.^v By contrast, households elsewhere that are remote from tourist attractions or near lower-earning sites, or do not own land, are less able to compete for conservation jobs or have little access to wildlife income overall. This applies to the outer Amboseli households (Burn Silver 2009); those close to Amboseli National Park reportedly earn significantly more, possibly comparable to those in Mara (Western, personal communication). In the poorest site, Longido, livestock remain the most important livelihood. Additional income streams are dominated by returns from off farm and farming, while wildlife revenues are minimal and poorly distributed across the wealth spectrum (Chenevix Trench et al. 2009; Figures 2 and 3b).