OLARE MOTOROGI CONSERVANCY is owned by over 300 Maasai landowners. Each holding a freehold title deed for their parcel of land within the Conservancy. These landowners have formed a partnership with the five tourism operators with the goal of running the Conservancy as a premium destination offering a private and exclusive experience to our visitors. At the same time the Conservancy also serves as a pool of natural resources essential to the Maasai pastoralist community that can be utilised in an environmentally sustainable manner.

The Conservancy landowners are from a mix of clans and the communal pastoral culture of sharing resources leads to an interesting and novel approach to land use and conservation.

Combining traditional generosity with the western concept of private land ownership has led to the Conservancy developing a pioneering management model where landowners each individually lease their land to a Land Holding Company owned by themselves and as a group they in turn contract this contiguous area to a management company. This management partnership is governed by a Board of Directors balanced between landowners with more traditional pastoralist interests and the Conservancy’s tourism operators with their more western commercial understanding.

The management partnership has led to the ability of the Conservancy’s landowners and the surrounding communities to maintain much of their pastoral culture at the same time as assuring the landowners a guaranteed income derived from tourism. Through controlled and a well-managed grazing policy the surrounding Maasai communities have been able to maintain healthy herds of cattle in a region where overgrazing and poor land management is rapidly drying up the ability to support quality herds of cattle.

Today the Conservancy employs 23 community rangers and is giving valuable wildlife management and community leadership experience to an efficient conservancy administration team. We have built workshops and an administration HQ and have field bases within the Conservancy all equipped with solar power and communication equipment. The Conservancy has invested in two tractors and an array of road-building equipment along with a dam scoop for expanding the Conservancy’s water resources and storage capacity for both its controlled grazing scheme and the wildlife.