When community members from across Kenya's Upper Ewaso Ng'iro Basin gathered to map wildlife movement routes, something striking happened. Independently, across different groups, participants pointed to the same places — the same bottlenecks, the same conflict zones, the same fragmented corridors. The map that emerged was not a surprise to the people who live within it. It was a confirmation. 

The Upper Ewaso Ng'iro Basin is one of Kenya's most ecologically significant landscapes, linking protected areas, forests, and community lands across a vast network of wildlife movement routes. But that network is fracturing. Settlement expansion and agricultural encroachment are narrowing the corridors that elephants and other wildlife depend on to move between habitats. As space shrinks, contact between wildlife and farming communities increases, and so does conflict. 

Human-elephant conflict is not simply an inconvenience. Crop raids can erase an entire season's harvest overnight. The financial and psychological toll on farming families is severe, and the resentment it generates toward conservation efforts runs deep. Addressing it requires more than reactive mitigation. It requires understanding where and why it happens, and intervening at the source. 

From 5 to 7 May 2026, the Wyss Academy and CETRAD convened an Integrated Wildlife Corridor Protection and Human-Elephant Conflict Mitigation Workshop, bringing together community participants from 12 focal sites alongside county government officers from Isiolo and Meru, Kenya Wildlife Service personnel, conservation NGOs, and technical consultants. 

The workshop validated Participatory GIS mapping data on wildlife movement routes and conflict hotspots, reviewed scientific evidence and regional case studies, and built a shared framework for prioritising conservation action. Two wildlife corridors were identified as highest priority for immediate protection. Two major conflict hotspots were flagged for urgent mitigation. 

What the process confirmed was as important as what it produced. Communities and technical experts consistently identified the same bottlenecks. Local ecological knowledge, accumulated over generations of living alongside wildlife, aligned directly with scientific analysis. That convergence strengthened both the credibility of the findings and community ownership of the proposed interventions. 

The spatial relationship between blocked corridors and recurring conflict is not coincidental. Where wildlife movement is constrained, animals concentrate. Where they concentrate near farmland, conflict follows. Restoring corridor connectivity is therefore not only an ecological intervention. It is a conflict reduction strategy. 

The workshop produced four concrete outcomes: validated priority corridors and conflict hotspots; stakeholder consensus on intervention priorities; strengthened collaboration between communities, county governments, Kenya Wildlife Service, and conservation partners; and identifiedspecific next steps including corridor demarcation, community-based conflict mitigation, and long-term monitoring. 

Proposed corridor boundaries and interventions will continue to be refined through ongoing stakeholder engagement and county planning processes. 

The approach developed here, combining participatory GIS, scientific analysis, and structured multi-stakeholder dialogue, offers a practical framework for landscapes across Kenya and East Africa facing similar pressures. Conservation planning that starts with community knowledge, tests it against scientific evidence, and builds institutional consensus around the findings does not just produce better maps. It produces plans that communities and governments are invested in implementing. 

The Wyss Academy's work in the Upper Ewaso Ng'iro Basin is grounded in that premise. Durable conservation outcomes require locally grounded, evidence-based planning, with the people who live within these landscapes as genuine partners in designing them. 

An article co-written by Judith Koskey & Daria Vuistiner. Edited by Predrag Tripkovìc.