Promoting Women’s Voices in Conservation

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In March 2021, the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) and Conservation International (CI) co-hosted a two-day Women's Leadership Summit that brought together 40 indigenous women leaders from NRT's 39 member conservancies in Northern and Coastal Kenya.

The summit targeted established and emerging women leaders from across NRT’s community conservancies to strengthen leadership skills, build a sense of shared empowerment, promote diversity in leadership, expand networks, create role models and ultimately identify and recruit future women leaders from the conservancies.

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Women's voices and leadership in conservation got highlighted at the Summit. The women leaders who attended the event spearhead various projects in their respective conservancies including BeadWORKS, peace-building efforts, rangelands rehabilitation, temporary octopus closures, mangrove restoration, ocean plastic collection and recycling, and micro-finance program. They had a chance to interact with women who occupy both business and political positions.

The summit was crucial in uniting the voices of women from all backgrounds who were encountering different environmental challenges but shared similar struggles in terms of women's roles in the home, community and business.

“By getting together and talking about the many obstacles and triumphs they have experienced, it became clear that long-term conservation and human well-being can only be achieved when both men and women are involved in and influence decision-making,” says Josephine Ekiru, NRT’s peace programme lead.

The necessity of increasing diversity in leadership, identifying and developing future female leaders, and fostering a sense of shared empowerment were all key messages from the weekend. The participants left with the goal of empowering other women to get more involved in conservation and community development, as well as improving their own knowledge, skills, and mandate to support gender equality in community conservation.

Since 2017, CI has actively partnered with NRT on several fronts to advance women’s conservation leadership:

  • Direct support to four indigenous women fellows to advance women’s conservation leadership

  • Technical advice on the development of NRT’s gender strategy

  • Linking NRT’s BeadWORKS initiative with professional marketing and business strategy consultants

  • Increasing the number of women peace ambassadors

vivian jebet