- In Kenya, an uproar briefly followed the August announcement that the beloved Karura Forest north of Nairobi would no longer be jointly managed by local citizens’ group Friends of Karura Forest and the Kenya Forest Service; the decision has since been reversed.
- The 15-year partnership has restored several indigenous plant species to the Karura Forest, which is also a haven for wildlife such as jackals, bush pigs and small antelopes.
- Previously, the area was threatened by land-grabbers and illegal logging; today, the initiative employs more than 35 staff, who work on forest restoration, security and infrastructure maintenance while some 300 local community members supply thousands of tree seedlings each month for reforestation.
NAIROBI — The Karura Forest covers about 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres) just north of the Kenyan capital. Thousands of locals visit the forest every month, to escape Nairobi’s noisy streets and unwind beneath Karura’s green canopy. This oasis of calm has been jointly managed by a local citizens’ organization, Friends of Karura Forest, and the Kenya Forest Service since 2010. When KFS announced in August that this arrangement was set to be changed, there was an uproar.
The government has since reversed the decision, and the forest service and FKF will now continue jointly managing the forest. Over the past 15 years, the partnership has restored indigenous plant cover in Karura and provided a green lung for Nairobi.
Karura’s indigenous plant species have been restored, including the stately African onionwood (Cassipourea malosana), with its dense canopy of glossy, dark green leaves; forest ironplum (Drypetes gerrardii), whose fruit is eaten by birds and small mammals; and wild jasmine (Schrebera alata), a favorite of pollinators. The forest has also become a haven for wildlife including jackals, bush pigs and three antelope species, Harvey’s duiker (Cephalophus harveyi), suni (Neotragus moschatus), and bushbuck (Tragelaphus scriptus).
Walking paths have been established among the tall closed-canopy forests. Karanja Njoroge, a board member and former chair of Friends of Karura Forest, says each month, some 75,000 visitors pay a gate fee of 10-100 shillings (up to about $0.75) to enter and enjoy the forest.
In the decades prior to FKF’s involvement, Karura was badly damaged by commercial logging, which removed trees such as eucalyptus and cypress for timber without replanting them as required by forestry regulations.
People from communities in the poor neighborhoods adjacent to the forest regularly entered it to gather firewood, produce charcoal and hunt rabbits and bush pigs. Politically connected individuals also illegally helped themselves to large sections of the gazetted forest reserve for housing development.
“Before FKF was formed, Karura was in danger of being lost to land-grabbers and illegal loggers. The forest was also a haven for criminals where gangs tortured, raped and murdered their victims,” Njoroge told Mongabay.
In 2010, the government proposed that FKF, a community forest association, would begin jointly managing Karura with the forestry service.
“It was hard work when we started,” Njoroge told Mongabay. “The government then had already subdivided sections of the forest as plots and issued title deeds to individuals and companies.”
He said FKF’s first priority was to fence the entire forest to prevent people with these irregular titles from continuing to build inside the forest. The association also began working with people from nearby informal settlements. “We involved these communities and promised to allow them to collect firewood in the forest under supervision and in turn, that they would protect the fence and only use the gates identified for their fuelwood collection.
“We also told them to organize themselves into groups to do work in the forest for pay. We instructed them to uproot all the invasive species like Lantana camara, which were choking other indigenous species in the forest,” Njoroge explained.
Today, the initiative employs more than 35 staff, who work on forest restoration, security, and infrastructure maintenance. A further 300 individuals from local communities also supply thousands of tree seedlings each month for reforestation projects.
FKF has facilitated the gradual replacement of eucalyptus, pine and other exotic trees planted during colonial times, with approximately 70 different local tree species, Njoroge told Mongabay.
One of the approaches was the deployment of a forest restoration technique developed in Japan in the 1970s. The Miyawaki method involves densely planting patches of degraded land with a variety of species of seedlings, mimicking the diversity of trees that would reestablish themselves in a natural forest’s recovery. Karura is one of many places around the world where this technique has allowed rapid growth of a dense canopy.
Simon Kage is the director of a private firm based in Nairobi, Integrated Forest Consultancy and Management, which won a contract from Japan’s Yokohama National University to carry out the Miyawaki reforestation work in Karura. He said FKF’s involvement has been vital. “First, it was through the partnership that we secured the space in Karura to do our rehabilitation work,” he told Mongabay by telephone.
“Secondly, it was through the partnership that we secured casual labor to dig the holes, plant the seedlings and take care of the plants thereafter,” he said.
Across the gazetted forest’s area, indigenous tree cover has risen to 60%, up from around 25% when FKF got involved in 2010.
With joint management producing success, Njoroge was alarmed by the August announcement that FKF and its employees would no longer be allowed into the forest. This decision has now been rolled back. Going forward, the only change will be that revenue collected from gate fees at Karura will be channeled through the government’s digital payment system, eCitizen, and then transferred into the joint account run by FKF and KFS.
“There was some small [mis]understanding between us and FKF,” George Tarus, senior conservator of forests at KFS, told Mongabay by telephone, “but the issues have been resolved and everybody is reading from the same page.”
He said the forest service is keen to maintain its partnership with FKF, and the change in how gate fees are collected was made to bring Karura in line with government policy. “This is a government requirement for accountability purposes, and KFS being a government agency, we must abide by this. Otherwise, the money would be channeled back to our joint account with FKF to be expended as before.”
Njoroge pointed out that eCitizen will impose an additional 50 shillings ($0.40) for every transaction, effectively doubling the cost of entry for a child, for instance, and raising the price of general admission by 100-150 shillings (up to $1.15).
“FKF is a nonprofit organization whose primary purpose is to conserve the forest and support communities that live adjacent to it. We have kept the costs low since 2010 to enable anyone to be able to afford and enjoy the forest.”
Friends of Karura Forest is a community forest association — one of more than 250 similar bodies created under the Kenya Forest Act 2005, which allows communities living adjacent to forest reserves to collaborate with the Kenya Forest Service to manage and protect.
FKF’s legal standing provided a framework for the group’s work on restoring Karura, Njoroge said, and its success can serve as a model for other CFAs across the country.
“In many ways, our model can be replicated in most peri-urban and rural settings in Kenya and beyond because the basic principle is the involvement of the community from planning to execution of the objectives,” he said.
“However, Karura is also unique in the sense that we are surrounded both by rich neighborhoods and extremely poor communities,” he told Mongabay, “so you have to delicately balance how you take care of the needs of both in your conservation plans.”
Njoroge said it is important that community forest associations retain real decision-making power.
“It will not work if KFS were to lord it over the community, because there will be resistance. The work is also entirely voluntary with no monetary benefits, which calls for a lot of sacrifice.”
Peter Mugo, the chair of Bahati CFA in Nakuru in the central Rift Valley agrees that the Karura model is an example for other CFAs. “We try to emulate what they do in Karura in the Mau conservancy,” he told Mongabay by telephone.
But of course, Mugo’s CFA doesn’t have the benefit of 75,000 paying visitors every month. He noted that it is difficult to replicate the level of impact FKF has had over a vast area such as the Mau Forest. “Sometimes we get frustrated that we don’t receive enough support from KFS to protect the trees we have planted in Mau, for instance. We lack the resources to monitor such a vast area,” he said.
Kage, whose firm worked on reestablishing native species in Karura, observed that community involvement has played a pivotal role in rehabilitation and management there.
“You cannot protect forests by guns or electric fences; you need the social fence, which is the community, to effectively protect forests,” he told Mongabay.
Banner image: Integrated Forestry Consultancy and Management Services staff take growth measurements of indigenous trees in Karura forest. Image courtesy of Simon Kage.
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