The Kitenden Corridor

The Sinya region in West Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, is one of the last remaining true wilderness areas where elephants migrate here from the Amboselli Ecosystem in Kenya and back through the Kitenden Migration Corridor. I got news recently that KiliAvo, an agricultural investment firm, has bought out a massive area of land within a migration corridor adjacent to Amboseli National Park on the Kenyan side. Their plan is to farm avocados for export, blocking a significant percentage of critical wildlife habitat and migration pathways; not to mention draining extreme amounts of limited underground water reserves, and further reducing grazing land for the local Maasai people.

Such a barrier to elephant migration will result in the loss of essential food, water, and genetic diversity that such movement provides, leading to the creation of wildlife islands, and eventually the collapse of the wider ecosystems and elephant and other wildlife numbers. Re: the economic side, the employment and foreign currency this project could generate pales in comparison to what the impacted tourism industry, and even the local pastoralist value chain, would have brought in.

We urge you, when on safari to Sinya, to be fellow advocates for this ecosystem, even if it’s just realizing that this area is part of a much wider network for wildlife and people to thrive.