Community

Wildlife Works’ objective is stated in our name. We save wildlife by creating sustainable jobs that make wildlife conservation more valuable to rural communities than poaching or slash and burn agriculture. In total, Wildlife Works today provides close to 150 jobs to the local community, with 100% health insurance to the employees and their families, and wages many times the average annual income in Kenya. We close the loop with jobs – sustainable jobs. Most of our employees have been with us since our inception in 1997.

We also pay our employees to build infrastructure for the community at large. Using a grant from the Dutch government and sweat equity from local parents, Wildlife Works employees built 18 new classrooms for primary school children, who had previously had no books, no desks and often dilapidated classrooms, if any at all.

Our carpenter, Nicholas Ndau, single-handedly built 300 new student desks to furnish the classrooms, and we purchased more than 1000 essential textbooks.

We created a clean water supply for the schools using an innovative rainwater catchment system and manual rower pump to allow the children to retrieve the water from underground storage tanks.

Before these changes, children in the community had given up on ever being able to go to high school. The year after we built the schools, two students passed their national high school entrance exams. Sponsored by Wildlife Works through our school fees donations partner, www.kelimutrust.org, they went off to high school and both have interned with us to gain invaluable work experience. Kelimu Trust was founded by Wildlife Works first Kenyan manager Alice Owen, and now sponsors 65 Kenyan children and young adults at various stages of higher education.

Meet the people behind Wildlife Works and the surrounding community with whom we work and live. Learn about the social impact of Wildlife Works in the Kasigau Corridor region.

Find us by clicking on the Community category located on the right side nav bar.