The journey to Eor Ewuaso village in Kenya’s Narok county is a challenge: sharp bends, corrugated roads and a scorching sun define this remote part of the country.
Here, near the indigenous Mau forest, you’ll find the Paran centre. For almost 20 years, the group has brought together women from three local communities — Maasai, Kalenjin and Ogiek — to eradicate illegal logging and charcoal burning.
It’s an important task: the Mau forest complex is the largest indigenous montane forest in East Africa’s Rift Valley, covering about 380,000ha. There’s rich biodiversity in its 22 blocks, and it is the source of a number of rivers, including the Mara and Ewaso Nyiro. But it is under threat from illegal logging and the burning of timber for charcoal
The World Forest Organisation estimates that about one-third of Africa’s forests have been lost, largely to charcoal production. In Kenya, most of that degradation has taken place in forest-rich rural areas, according to forestry scientists Phosiso Sola and Paolo Omar Cerutti, writing on The Conversation Africa website.
To mitigate the effect, the government imposed a logging ban in 2017. It was renewed in 2018 and reportedly again last year. But, according to a 2021 report by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), that moratorium simply fuelled an underground charcoal market.
By the ISS’s estimate, the charcoal sector supports about 700,000 people in Kenya and, with 1.4-million households relying on charcoal for domestic use, the market is thought to be worth about $427m a year.
Now, in the face of rising oil and cooking gas prices, more people are turning to charcoal, Kenya’s Standard newspaper reports.
In Narok, however, the women of Paran are working with government agencies, including the Kenya Forest Service and Kenya Wildlife Service, among others, to mitigate this.
“We have two main goals,” Paran executive director Naiyan Kiplagat tells the FM. “Battling climate change and poverty.”
Deforestation poses a threat to Africa’s natural forests. A community group in Kenya is doing its part to combat the effects of illegal logging
— What it means:
Back in 2005, the women of southern Narok realised the detrimental effect the charcoal trade was having on their lives and livelihoods.
“On a day like today, you would have seen so many donkeys carrying charcoal all over here. The smoke from charcoal-burning kilns was choking and many people got sick,” Kiplagat says. “We as women saw that the activity was affecting our lives, as water in the rivers started declining and crops in our farms were withering.”
She adds: “We held our hands together and said: ‘We will not sit and watch our animals and rivers disappearing just because of a few greedy individuals.’ We then took action to save the situation.”
The group started by establishing a nursery to replace indigenous trees in the forest. But it struggled to get off the ground — until Kenya’s Nobel Peace prize-winner Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement bought its seedlings for cash.
Today, Paran sells its seedlings to individuals, NGOs and government agencies, and has itself planted thousands of indigenous trees in the Mau forest. When the FM visits the centre, Paray says it has more than 50,000 seedlings at its various satellites that are ready to go into the ground — most of them indigenous.
The organisation uses the proceeds from its sales to fund its conservation and empowerment initiatives. On the conservation side, it works to ensure illegal logging is monitored and reported, and it engages with local law enforcement to ensure there’s no charcoal burning in its vicinity.
It also offers training and capacity building for women — teaching skills such as the construction of manyatta (traditional huts), bread making, poultry farming, gardening and the like. The idea is to offer local women alternatives to burning charcoal for income generation.
On its 5ha grounds, Paran provides work for women: it has a bee-keeping operation; beading works (for sale to tourists); and a section where women make more efficient cooking stoves. Its members run manyatta lodges, where guests pay the equivalent of R280 a night, inclusive of dinner and breakfast.
Paran also offers conservation education, inviting experts to address its members, as well as training and seminars to eradicate female genital mutilation and child marriage.
Though it started small, it has grown to become an umbrella organisation, housing 17 smaller groups.
“The number of women who wanted to join Paran after seeing our work was too big and we saw that we couldn’t manage, so we asked them to form groups and join Paran as an umbrella,” says Kipligat.
For some, it’s been a godsend.
Paran deputy chair Noloorani Kimorgo, for one, says her manyatta-building skills are much improved since she joined the group. As a result, the widow and mother of two says she’s been able to secure contracts to build manyatta for tourists around the popular Maasai Mara reserve.
It’s helped in other ways too. During Covid, for example, the centre ran a cereal bank to assist vulnerable community members.
“I never experienced hunger during Covid times,” Kimorgo says. “I was given food here. My children never experienced hunger, though other people around the country were suffering.”
Kiplagat believes women in the region are particularly vulnerable to climate change, as most, like her, are peasant farmers who depend on rain-fed agriculture. When the rains fail — as they have in Kenya for the past three years — the farmers also fail.
“As peasant farmers, climate change is our biggest enemy, which we must fight to the end,” she says.
We held our hands together and said: ‘We will not sit and watch our animals and rivers disappearing just because of a few greedy individuals’
— Naiyan Kiplagat
There’s particular value in getting locals involved in conservation and climate change-mitigation efforts. Geoffrey Wafula, county director for the National Environmental Authority, says indigenous communities are key in the fight against climate change, given their knowledge of the land.
It’s a point echoed by Francis Kagema, regional co-ordinator for Nature Kenya. Kagema believes local communities are important stewards of the forests: because they are reliant on the vegetation for their food and medicines, conservation is built into their tradition and customs. And when it comes to reforestation, they have the benefit of local knowledge: they know which trees should be planted in which locations.
Through its network of organisations, Paran has seen some success in addressing deforestation in Kenya — and, in particular, it says, in helping to restore the Mara and Ewaso Nyiro rivers, both of which are important for tourism.
As far as Wafula is concerned, the women have proven their resolve when it comes to conservation.
But that hasn’t been without pushback. “The main economic activity in this area was charcoal burning,” says Stephen Olepan, a Paran volunteer project officer and the only man in the group.
Olepan grew up in the area, and remembers a time when it was “full of trees and there was enough rain”.
“Then it reached a time when the rains disappeared and we started experiencing drought,” he tells the FM. “This is the time when the women saw the danger ahead and started this conservation project.”
Though it wasn’t easy to turn the community away from charcoal burning, Paran’s training and income-earning opportunities proved incentive enough for some. For those more wedded to charcoal burning, the group lobbied government administrators and local chiefs to help them change perceptions.
If it weren’t for their efforts, says Olepan, the village “could have been a desert” today.
Paran hasn’t just changed perceptions about conservation. Prior to its success, women from indigenous communities were largely regarded as non-earning homemakers, says Olepan. But as they started earning money from Paran’s projects, that changed — not least among the women themselves. “The formation of groups and learning to work together enabled women to see the light,” he says.
It’s a point echoed by Keleina Ole Nchoe, chair of the Maasai council of elders. “When we were growing up, women were [treated] like children — they weren’t allowed to do such projects, and were always under male supervision,” he tells the FM.
“I am happy that today women are doing amazing projects to uplift their community.”
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