What issues are facing the Maasai?

Answer 1

The Challenges

Biodiversity depletion and poverty of people are among the world´s greatest problems today. Climate change and a rapidly growing world population put severe strain on world resources ad ecosystem services. Land use trends affect Natural Resources, cultural environments and social development.

The Maasai Mara ecosystem in south-western Kenya experiences all these challenges and faces great change in the coming decades.

Challenges identified in dialogue with local stakeholders

Through a close dialogue with a broad group of stakeholders at a Summit at Maasai Mara University in April 2015, we have identified and described a number of connected challenges:

1. climate change and land use challenges

2. ecosystem challenges

3. political and economic challenges

4. human and cultural challenges including health issu

Answer 2

What problems do they face?

One threat to the Maasai has come from from game hunters in the Loliondo region of northern Tanzania. Here, Maasai villages have been burnt to the ground by the authorities, and thousands have brutally evicted to provide a company, Otterlo Business Corporation Ltd (OBC), with more access to land for game hunting.

A Maasai woman in Southern Kenya. © Adrian Arbib/Survival

Most of what used to be Maasai land has already been taken over, for private farms and ranches, for government projects, wildlife parks or private hunting concessions. Mostly they retain only the driest and least fertile areas.

The stress this causes to their herds has often been aggravated by attempts made by governments to ‘develop’ the Maasai. These are based on the idea that they keep too much cattle for the land.

However, they are in fact very efficient livestock producers and rarely have more animals than they need or the land can carry. These ‘development’ efforts try to change their system of shared access to land.

While this has suited outsiders and some entrepreneurial Maasai who have been able to acquire land for themselves or sell it off, it has often denuded the soil and brought poverty to the majority of Maasai, who are left