Wildlife populations are declining severely in many protected areas and unprotected pastoral areas of Africa. Rapid large-scale land use changes, poaching, climate change, rising population pressures, governance, policy, economic and socio-cultural transformations and competition with livestock all contribute to the declines in abundance. Here we analyze the population dynamics of 15 wildlife and four livestock species monitored using aerial surveys from 1977 to 2011 within Kajiado County of Kenya, with a rapidly expanding human population, settlements, cultivation and other developments.

This is the story of a group of women from the Kitengela rangelands area, which boarders the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, who have come together to form the Olmakao Cultural Village to provide alternative sources of income to their livestock-based livelihoods in the face of increasingly frequent droughts that have decimated their herds.