Linking Masai Mara and the Serengeti

Home to the new Mara Siana Camp, the Ripoi Conservancy is one of the wildlife reserves near the Kenya-Tanzania border that could be included in an ambitious project to establish an international wildlife corridor across the sprawling Serengeti-Masai Mara transboundary ecosystem.

Prior to the 1890s when Britain and Germany conquered and then divided East Africa into two colonial territories, the vast grasslands between Lake Victoria and the Great Rift Valley were a single, uninterrupted ecosystem. For thousands of years, the Masai and other local peoples had moved freely through the region, coexisting with the vast herds and millions of other animals.

Nowadays nearly all the region is protected within the boundaries of national parks and conservations areas, or communal and private conservancies. But the quality of protection, resources, and management often varies, a situation that prompted calls for a transboundary corridor that could conceivably extend all the way from Kenya’s Mara region across Tanzania’s Serengeti Plains to Ngorongoro Crater and maybe even Lake Manyara.  

So far, the most ambitious effort to achieve this dream was the Initiative for the Conservation of the Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem (SEMA), a project that studied the feasibility of creating a transboundary corridor by helping local communities achieve sustainable livelihoods and enhance wildlife protection and park management through regional cooperation.

More likely than one giant step, realization of the dream will probably take smaller steps over many years.

“Our vision,” says Jackson Looseyia, one of the co-owners of Mara Siana Camp, “is creating a corridor that includes the two conservancies just below us. A bigger plan is to connect all the area from Masai Mara National Reserve to the Loita Hills. Expand further and further, creating more habitat for the elephants and everything else.”