Maasai Mara Conservancy

The Maasai Mara Conservancies form a network of community-owned and managed wildlife areas surrounding Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve. They extend the protected landscape beyond the reserve, creating important wildlife corridors and dispersal areas while giving local Maasai landowners a direct economic stake in conservation. Conservancies such as Naboisho, Olare Motorogi, Mara North and Ol Kinyei combine wildlife protection, carefully managed tourism, community enterprise and sustainable land-use planning.

Collectively, the model has become one of Africa’s leading examples of community-led conservation, demonstrating how tourism revenues, landowner benefits and wildlife conservation can be integrated to protect the wider Mara ecosystem. For the National Park Conservancy (NPC) model, the Maasai Mara provides a particularly strong precedent for developing a structured conservation-and-tourism buffer around a protected area, linking communities, private-sector investment, conservation organisations and government through coordinated land-use planning and destination management.