05/16/2025
MEDIA STATEMENT
Friday, 16th May 2025
For Immediate Release
NECA Submits Memorandum on Wildlife Conservation and Management Bill, 2025
The North Eastern Conservancies Association (NECA), representing community conservancies in Garissa, Wajir, and Mandera, has formally submitted its memorandum to the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife on the proposed Wildlife Conservation and Management Bill, 2025.
Our communities have long lived alongside wildlife, not as beneficiaries but as the ones who bear the costs. From destroyed crops to human-wildlife conflict and displacement, the burden has fallen on the shoulders of pastoralist families with little to no compensation, recognition, or support.
NECA’s memorandum urges Parliament to ensure the new Bill anchors in law:
• Formal benefit-sharing for communities living with wildlife;
• Legal recognition and funding priority for community conservancies, especially in arid and semi-arid northern Kenya;
• Mandatory inclusion of ASAL communities in all key wildlife governance bodies and tribunals;
• Extension of human-wildlife conflict reporting timelines to at least 7 days, and the inclusion of giraffes and snakes in the compensation schedule.
Without strong legal provisions that protect and empower community conservancies—especially in the historically underfunded north—wildlife conservation will remain unjust, extractive, and unsustainable.
Our recommendations draw on global best practices from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and Mexico, and are grounded in the lived experience of our people.
We call on the Ministry and Parliament to adopt these amendments in full, so that communities finally benefit legally, financially, and fairly from the wildlife they’ve always protected.
End.
Contact:
Sharmake Mohamed
CEO, North Eastern Conservancies Association (NECA)
Garissa.
[email protected]
+254 722101405
