Project Olgulului, Kenya is a pilot development project, in early-stage development, with a Maasai community at the Olgulului ranch in southern Kenya, adjacent to the Amboseli National Park. Focus is on scaling up of Project Wadi Attir’s experience with dryland ecosystem restoration, addressing issues of food security; dryland agriculture and water management in areas prone to frequent draughts; restoration and conservation of a degraded ecosystem; enhancement of biodiversity; and economic and community development.
The project will be designed to deliver major benefits to the local community by enhancing agricultural productivity, increasing biodiversity and biomass cover, and boosting ecotourism potential. Agricultural productivity will be increased, without the need for further land clearing, by rehabilitating soil and improving its fertility, instituting agroforestry and permaculture methods that can support the production of high value-added farm products, and employing suitable irrigation and low-level water management technologies.
The project will leverage Maasai tradition, aspirations, and indigenous experience with innovative, suitable technologies and modern-day science. We intend to achieve the project’s goals by adhering to the sustainability principles developed by The Lab, as these principles relate to reducing green gas emissions, the use of alternative energy technologies, land restoration and land degradation neutrality, a waste-into-resources approach, and community development processes. The approach we plan to use will be based on techniques developed and tested successfully at Project Wadi Attir, The Lab’s flagship initiative with a Bedouin community in Israel’s Negev Desert, a similar semi dryland environment.
Ultimately, the proposed initiative aims to expand prospects and produce positive, life affirming impacts for the whole Olgulului community and its physical environment. As a practical matter, the intention is to start with a pilot initiative focusing on a subset of the community, involving approximately 30 families and 1,000 acres, and later expand the project to include more inhabitants and a larger area of land.
