More Than a Decade On: Helping Ol Pejeta Conservancy to Deliver Conservation and Development Impact 

Fauna & Flora International (FFI) teamed with local partners and international funders to establish the 90,000-acre Ol Pejeta Conservancy in 2003. Located at the foot of Mount Kenya, Ol Pejeta plays a vital part in the Laikipia ecosystem in northern Kenya, protecting critical migration corridors and diverse wildlife, including black rhino and Grevy’s zebra.

Since transferring ownership of the conservancy to a Kenyan non-profit organization in 2005, FFI has remained on Ol Pejeta’s Board of Directors and currently works with Ol Pejeta on a joint program to ensure extension of wildlife habitat, local community support and livelihoods, and financial self-sustainability.

Ol Pejeta is one of the few conservancies in the world to cover its costs through its own commercial activities: tourism and agriculture. 75,000 acres of the conservancy are dedicated to conservation, while the remaining land is used for cattle ranching and growing wheat. Ol Pejeta is also home to six tourism facilities providing beds for up to 150 tourists a night. Last year, more than 85,000 tourists and school children visited.

Joanna Elliott, FFI's Senior Director, Conservation Partnerships will talk about the current land and wildlife management context and the challenges Ol Pejeta faces, including in helping local people and wildlife to weather extreme drought, and safeguarding its rhino population against a well-armed and organized poaching threat.

Speaker Bio:

With an Economics degree from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the London Business School, Joanna Elliott spent her early career in banking and management consultancy before deciding to apply those economics and business skills to the conservation sector, in which she has worked for the past twenty years. She has lived for extensive periods in Indonesia and Kenya, where she worked on long-term assignments for the World Bank, USAID Indonesia, and Kenya Wildlife Service as well as WWF and The Nature Conservancy before joining the African Wildlife Foundation as Vice President for Program Design.

Joanna joined FFI in early 2013 as Senior Director, Conservation Partnerships based in Cambridge. Her recent work has focused on biodiversity-poverty linkages, impact assessment, large scale project design, protected areas systems, and conservation-business partnerships. Joanna is on the Board of Directors of Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya, and Chuilexi Conservancy in Mozambique. She is also a visiting Fellow in Biodiversity and Society at the International Institute for Environment and Development and currently serves on the Darwin Expert Committee for DEFRA and DFID.