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Kenya

Samburu Obama flagged as ‘eloquent spokesman’ for conservation receives first in a continent

Before presiding over the cheque handover at the Kalama Conservancy base, he presided over a ground breaking ceremony at the Kalama Primary School — for the construction of two additional classrooms.

An additional two classrooms funded from a development kitty contributed to by the Community and the Northern Rangeland Trust which has the Nature Conservancy as a, “core principal funder.”

At the start of the ceremony, two rows of about two dozen children troop out of one of the classrooms with barbed wire for windows to put on a show; girls in the front, boys at the back.

And though their moves are coordinated, their appearances are anything but uniform in the strictest sense of the word; while some meet the searing hot ground in flip flops, others don cracked plastic slip-ons and still others don’t have even that; bare skin on hot, rocky ground.

Their uniforms tell a similar tale, one girl wears a dress that’s ripped at the waist while another wears a blue dress different from the various shades of green, at different stages of wear and tear, her compatriots have on.

Lalampaa didn’t go to school too far from the Kalama Primary School – in similar conditions — but still, he says, it was quite a distance from home. “So I was a boarder all of my school life and when we’d close for the holidays sometimes I’d come to where I last left my family and I wouldn’t find them. Because of the nomadic lifestyle we lead, they’d have moved in search of pasture.”

Home wasn’t the only thing that was at the mercy of the seasons, so was his school fees; when drought hit, it didn’t just dry out the ground, it also dried out pockets. Largely because pastoralists are not known for readily parting with their cows which according to Maasai folklore; they were charged with caring for by none other than God himself.

And often when they reach the point at which they have little choice in the matter, they are unlikely to get the best prices for their cattle which are themselves pretty far gone at this point.

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And it’s this, in part, which Lalampaa seeks to remedy through his work as NRT Chief Programmes Officer. “It’s not that pastoralists don’t sell their cows, they do. Just look at it this way, we’ll start off with the smaller animals kind of how when you need to withdraw a small amount you’ll go to the ATM but when you need to make a large withdrawal you’ll go to the counter. An over-the-counter withdrawal requires more of you; the cow is the over-the-counter withdrawal.”

Through its Livestock to Market programme, NRT Trading seeks to couple the developmental concerns of the community with conservation.
By offloading the cattle from the pastoral communities, the strain on the pasture they share with the wildlife is lessened and as Lepeta put it, the community can sell their cows, later restock and

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