Eco-tourism in Lake Victoria’s Yala wetlands: Training tomorrow’s environmental leaders from within.

The Yala swamp sits in the basin of Kenya’s majestic Lake Victoria. Its papyrus wetlands not only support a wealth of biodiversity, but form an economic basis for thousands of Kenyans who make handicrafts from the vital resource. Yet the onslaught of agricultural development threatens to compromise the ecological integrity of Yala by draining crucial habitat for endangered animals and destroying the papyrus cash crop, bringing further ruin to the livelihood of local residents already living in abject poverty.

CREE is partnering with local conservation organizations like EcoFinder to preserve the Yala swamp through eco-tourism. Bringing tourists to the area will elevate awareness of Yala’s natural beauty and the need to conserve its resources while providing a sustainable economic model for Kenyans to develop their traditional “cottage industry” of papyrus products.

Cottage industry products

Conservation
Yala is home to thousands of rare species of mammals, fish and birds. It is internationally recognized as an Important Bird Area, possessing many papyrus endemic bird species which can be found nowhere else in the world. A diverse array of specialist birds inhabit the swamp’s papyrus stands including the Papyrus Yellow Warbler, Papyrus Gonolek, White Winged Warbler, Papyrus Canary, Caruthers’ Cisticola and Northern-Brown Throated Weaver. Birdlife International lists the Papyrus Yellow Warbler and Papyrus Gonolek as globally threatened bird species which require urgent conservation action (Birdlife International, IBAs Status Reports, 2004).

The area is also an important habitat and breeding ground for numerous fish such as the lungfish, mudfish and tilapia, and several larger animals like the hippopotamus, African python and the Sitatunga: a rare semi-aquatic antelope. Yala provides irreplaceable ecosystem services as well, including nutrient retention, erosion prevention and flood control when Lake Victoria swells with water during the rainy season.

A demonstration on using a pH meter by Mark Otieno of the Tropical Biology Institute

Socioeconomics
Despite its apparent abundance of natural resources, the Lake Victoria region is characterized by a poverty level of 64 % (UNDP, 2006) which drives many of its socio-economic and environmental problems. Many villages lack the most basic infrastructure like schools, toilets and permanent housing, and poverty is only exacerbated by a prevalence of diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

The anthropogenic pressures causing these conditions include unsustainable agricultural practices, pollution from both local and transnational companies, raw sewage leakage, waste from riparian communities that discharge feces into the lake, encroachment through settlements, poor fishing methods that use mosquito nets and chemicals such as chloroform, and improper papyrus harvesting techniques. This has compromised the ecosystem goods and services derived from the Lake Victoria region and impoverished the Nyanza province, which currently has the highest rate of poverty in Kenya.

Project Objectives
CREE seeks to empower local villagers within the area by giving them the means to turn these trends around for the benefit of their community. We plan to do this through funding a locally developed initiative called Ecofinder Kenya to develop sustainable eco-tourism in the Yala wetlands. The goal of eco-tourism in Yala is to enable sustainable use of the lake’s resources whilst preserving the wetland’s ability to deliver ecosystem goods and services. Reducing pressure on wetland resources by providing an avenue for non-consumptive utilization of the resources will foster an environmental ethic when coupled with training and outreach. This will be achieved in two ways:

• Tourism into the area for wildlife viewing
• The related ‘cottage industry’, which engages fishermen, women, and farmers in making household items from papyrus raw materials. This ‘eco-cultural’ tourism includes hand-made baskets, mats, robes, fishing gear, picture frames, wall crafts, house decorations, and furniture.

EcoFinder will help to organize papyrus harvesters into a cooperative or organized group so that they can self-regulate. EcoFinder leaders will train them on basic sustainable harvesting techniques such as the appropriate location to cut the papyrus, avoiding immature papyrus stalks and allowing cut zones to regenerate. Special care will be exercised in exclusive zones for birds and fish breeding grounds, as well as in lands for the semi-aquatic Sitatunga antelope. EcoFinder piloted this strategy with one of their partners at the Dunga Wetland and it showed encouraging preliminary results.

Members of EcoFinder Kenya and Lake Victoria Birders

EcoFinder’s multi-pronged eco-tourism plan also includes:

Local Research Initiatives
In order to determine the best sites for tourism, EcoFinder must undertake a thorough assessment of biological resources. This includes studies of bird populations to determine viewing opportunities, monitoring of populations, and habitat restoration in some cases. In the past, Ecofinder has promoted the establishment of Site Conservation Groups, (SCGs), which conserve various key ecosystems in Nyanza such as the threatened papyrus wetlands critical for bird diversity in the region. SCGs are also involved in environmental education, capacity building for common interest groups such as farmers and papyrus product producers, basic wetland monitoring, habitat restoration and promotion of environmental enterprises and sustainable resource extraction. They therefore have a history in the communities and are readily identifiable. The SCGs empower local people through giving them essential skills to conduct detailed biodiversity monitoring and research, preparing them for future employment.

Capacity building of new local environmental leaders
This involves informal training to enhance the capacity of grass-root communities on various aspects of community based natural resource management, including such cross-cutting themes as entrepreneurship and preventive healthcare. The organization is working with various Village Environmental Communities comprised of representative common interested groups to identify education and training needs. This will be coupled with Participatory Rural Appraisals to determine local aspirations and histories of involvement to capture how villagers will handle successes and problems coming about from future eco-tourism ventures.

Support for this project will go directly to:

• Building a Village Training and Resource Centre in the Yala Wetland to further enhance local peoples’ knowledge of eco-tourism and understanding of what sustainability means. The center point from which all tourism will eventually stem will be at the Yala Wetland in Nyanza province in western Kenya, covering the Siaya and Bondo Districts. This site is ideal due to its large size, complexity in terms of diverse habitat types, severity of threats and remoteness. It will also be imperative to have a network with other wetlands as satellite tourism stations in the near future.
• Identifying a cross-section of community members who can be trained to start as eco-tourism guides and also those with the capacity to begin a cottage industry (arts and crafts) small-scale business. These will be promoted through demonstration sites and micro-financing to enable local entrepreneurs to develop their own businesses after undergoing training in sustainability.
• Training a permanent project coordinator to liaise with all groups and ensure fair distribution of funds within the community.
• Purchasing a boat for guided wildlife viewing tours.

Local Institutional History
EcoFinder is an innovative and vibrant community-based organization founded in 1995 and registered with the Department of Social Services and Development of the Republic of Kenya as a Self-Help Group. Ecofinder is committed to the promotion of young peoples’ participation in conservation and sustainable development through generating livelihood and health benefits for local people at the household level. Traditionally they have focused on disadvantaged groups such as women and children. EcoFinder is run by a team of eight members working on a day-to-day basis to accomplish the twin goals of successful natural resource conservation and poverty alleviation.

Currently EcoFinder is working around pockets of papyrus wetlands including Dunga, Yala, Kusa, and Koguta villages. EcoFinder has a history of involvement in the Kusa and Koguta villages as well as other papyrus wetland areas, having established partnerships with Site Conservation Groups, local schools, and a Beach Management Unit, which is a Governmental Fisheries Department of elected officials nominated from fishermen to run the beaches and ensure that sanitation, hygiene and sustainable fisheries are realized.

Equitable engagement strategy
Through its activities in the Village Training and Resource Centre, EcoFinder will partner with schools for environmental education, outdoor activities, habitat restoration and environmentally friendly enterprises to engender environmental consciousness and stewardship in the community’s youth. This is crucial to the long term sustainability of the project by ensuring the next generation is prepared to take on the challenges of eco-tourism, and it also introduces locals to the proposed project in an informal manner.

Learning institutions have the potential to enhance domestic tourism when locals come to camp and study wetland/lake ecology, thereby providing an entry point for community members to engage with EcoFinder staff on the goals and expectations of the eco-tourism project. EcoFinder works with local people through organized groups such as Site Conservation Groups, Common Interest Groups (farmers, papyrus products makers, fisherpersons etc), the Beach Management Unit, Village Environmental Committees and schools. These groups have women, youth, and men. This broad cross-section of society minimizes local elites from dominating a project.