Green Warriors Movement

Background
Normally associated with the colour red due to their bright traditional shukas, a group of enterprising young Maasai in Kenya have gone green. The Green Warriors are spearheading a campaign to clean up the trading centres and entry points into the world famous Maasai Mara Reserve. As Timothy Katampoi, one of the founders explains, “Our overall aim is to involve the local community in the conservation of the Maasai Mara. We want to keep the environment clean and hospitable for ourselves and all visitors. The community members lack the knowledge and skills necessary for conservation matters and cannot take care of the environment in a good way. The project will empower the local communities with the required skills and knowledge to effectively conserve the bio-diversity of the region”.

Initiated in 2005, this motivated organisation sent an appeal to Tusk having ‘Googled’ the charity from an office they use at the Basecamp Explorer lodge in the Mara. The Trustees were so impressed with their enthusiasm and ingenuity that they awarded the group a Small Grant last year.

A large majority of the millions of tourists that visit the Mara each year drive to the reserve and in doing so they pass through one of the many small towns that have sprung up at the park’s main entry and exit points. As tour guides the founders of the Green Warriors, saw first hand how visitors reacted on seeing the rubbish that littered these trading centres. They also regularly found animals, both domestic and wild, that had died as a result of ingesting plastic. So they decided to take matters into their own hands and begin a campaign to clean up the Mara.

Cleaning up the Maasai Mara
Working with local schools, the Warriors hold regular clean up ‘harambees’ in towns such as Talek, and conduct community outreach workshops on the importance of keeping the environment clean and planting trees – since its inception the organisation has planted over 4,000 trees in the region. The Tusk grant will allow the group to go one step further and build a rubbish incinerator and a briquette machine to produce fuel bricks that can be burnt instead of wood cut fresh from trees.

This small grass-roots organisation is making a real difference in Talek and neighbouring towns adjacent to the Mara. Timothy concludes “As a community based organization, we aim to conserve the local environment but also we aspire to raise the living standards of the youth and local communities co-existing with the wildlife of our area so that they can see it as benefit to their lives”.

If you are planning a visit to the Maasai Mara in the near future do keep an eye out for the Green Warriors, as President Obama of the United States did when he visited Kenya before his election. He is pictured here with Amos, one of the founding members of the Green Warriors movement who presented him with a blessed 'rungu'.

Donate Now!

Join our growing online community on facebook to keep up-to-date with our news

Latest Tusk Video