The Lewa Wildlife Conservancy – 50 years in the Making

Session: Tim will give a personal account of his experience with Lewa & the Ngare Ndare forest for over half a century. This will entail the transition from farming in conflict with wildlife to settled coexistence and optimizing the use of the existing ecosystem.

Biographical data: Tim Roberts was brought up on a small tenanted farm in Cornwall, UK and awarded a BSc in Agriculture at Reading University in 1965 followed by a Diploma in Tropical Agriculture (DTA) at the UWI Trinidad a year later. He was posted to Kenya by the UK Overseas Development Administration and joined the Ministry of Agriculture as an extension officer in Meru for 5 years where he met is wife, the daughter of a settler farmer who owned 15,000 acres of land which is currently part of the Lewa estate. He worked a further 3 years in Nandi, west Kenya at Baraton, then at a livestock research station supervised by the national station at Naivasha before subsequently becoming the well known Baraton University. His experience in pastoral ism stems from working 18 months on the Baringo Semi Arid Area Project funded by the World Bank in 1980/81 and currently being on the UK board of SALTLICK which supports the Merille Rural Training Centre in northern Kenya.