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Save Nairobi National Park
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Save Nairobi National Park

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General information about NNP and what’s happening right now

Nairobi National Park was designated in 1946 after the Maasai agreed to give part of their ancestral land up for conservation and is the oldest park in East and Central Africa, spread out over 117km. It is home to many large mammals, including lions, buffalos and leopards and is the only sanctuary for black rhinos, one of the world’s most endangered species. The development would fence in the animals from the park and disallow any interaction between them and the Maasai animals, also fencing in the salt licks the Maasai’s cattle rely on, hurting them.
More recently the park experienced major infrastructural encroachments through the Southern Bypass, SGR Phase two, oil pipeline, and the inland Container Depot road all routed through the park. Due to these, we saw a heavy upsurge/resurgence of allelopathic invasive species specifically the highly noxious parthenium species invading the park. Another effect is the negative precedence already set where protected areas and other areas of ecological importance are now seen as idle land for developments and slowly losing the perspective of ecosystem services and values In 2018 however, the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife through the current Cabinet Secretary recorded a milestone success when they developed and launched Kenya's National Wildlife Strategy 2030.
Parks and protected areas have been over-exploited due to so many intrinsic and extrinsic factors such as inter alia increase in changes in land use, climate change, and weak public sensitization on matters conservation.
Here is the map of Nairobi National Park:
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More background information

Development has already begun to eat away at bits of the corridor and the fringes of the park itself already, from railways to pipelines to mining, and this luxury development would reduce the biodiversity of the area even more. The Maasai have co-existed with the park for decades, but their traditional way of life would be completely uprooted by this proposal.
This comes after the east African country’s Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife developed and launched its National Wildlife Strategy 2030 in 2018, which focused on maintaining and improving ecosystems to be resilient and more connected. But the construction of hotels, restaurants, and houses threatens this policy. The activists say the Kenyan government does not effectively involve stakeholders and conservation experts at any stage of the decision-making process, leading to this harmful development, only made worse by the lack of communication between agencies.

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