SORALO | About Us

About Us

ABOUT SORALO

SORALO, the South Rift Association of Land Owners, is a distinctive organization deeply rooted in the Maasai pastoralist communities of Kenya’s South Rift Valley. Founded in 2004, it embodies a community-first approach that honors Maasai traditions, values, and voices while advancing innovative conservation and sustainable land management.

What truly sets us apart is our seamless blending of ancient Maasai cultural wisdom with modern conservation. Rather than a top-down initiative, SORALO is a community-driven movement fostering a “culture of coexistence,” where people, their livestock, and abundant wildlife thrive side by side.

This ensures the Maasai maintain their semi-nomadic pastoral lifestyle while preserving one of Africa’s richest and most ecologically important landscapes. SORALO operates in an area of 1.5 million hectares of one of the last intact communal lands in southern Kenya territory that is vital not only for Maasai livelihoods but also for wildlife. A crucial part of our mission is preserving ecological connectivity in the South Rift Valley, linking key ecosystems such as Maasai Mara and Amboseli guided by our landscape approach. This connection is integral to/essential for wildlife migration and the resilience of one of East Africa’s most treasured natural heritage regions.

VISION

A healthy and Connected South Rift landscape in which Communities and Wildlife thrive

MISSION

Enabling Communities to Support and be Supported by Coexistence

In essence, SORALO represents a harmonious fusion of tradition and innovation, community spirit and conservation science, where people and nature flourish together. It offers an inspiring, unique model demonstrating how indigenous knowledge paired with contemporary conservation can create a sustainable, hopeful future solidifying SORALO’s role as a pioneering force for coexistence and resilience in East Africa.

Our last strategic plan (2018 - 2023) stands as one of SORALO’s greatest achievements, serving as a guiding document that has allowed us to make significant progress in supporting communities to coexist harmoniously with nature. Working alongside our communities in the South Rift over recent years has been a remarkable journey filled with both rewards and challenges. Seeing communities approach us for support in creating an environment conducive to coexistence is, for me, the highest achievement of any conservation organisation. We sincerely appreciate the support from our partners, which has helped us address this need to some extent. This journey continues, with SORALO now in a stronger position, thanks to our understanding of the region, clarity on what needs to be done, the capacity we possess as an organisation, the trust we have built with our communities, and the increasing support from partners and donors.

For the next phase, SORALO will establish management structures for shared resources and strengthen conflict management frameworks, including the Communal Justice System, to maintain harmonious communal lands in the South Rift Valley. SORALO will intensify its focus on landscape and community-first approaches for ecological connectivity, improve sustainable livelihoods, and empower Maasai communities to adapt and succeed while safeguarding their cultural heritage. This next phase builds on a solid foundation, leveraging trust, experience, and partnerships to move from successful groundwork to long-term resilience. As challenges such as land use change, population pressure, and habitat fragmentation grow more severe, innovative, community-led conservation solutions and rethinking our commons become even more essential. This phase is critically important to ensure that coexistence between people, livestock, and wildlife remains a lasting reality for future generations.

SORALO'S ORIGINS

“To know where you are going you need to know where you have come from.” It was a Tuesday in June 2003 that signalled the start of what was to become SORALO. But it began not with a name, but with a vision. The room was hot and smelled faintly of dust and bats. The overhead fan spun too slowly to dissipate the heat. But the energy in the room in the Magadi Soda factory grounds was tangible. The room was full of a mixture of faces – from Maasai elders to Dutch NGO workers, from newly fledged researchers to community leaders and conservation scientists. The agenda: the formation of a shared vision. A vision of a landscape, a working landscape, a Maasai landscape and a critical landscape for conservation. A vision of linking the Maasai Mara and Amboseli through a living landscape of coexistence.

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Some say to see is to believe, so the next step was a journey across Kenya to visit places in the Maasai Mara and Laikipia where we met with others who had similar ideas and shared values. There, we saw and learned about what worked and what didn’t, and what tools we could borrow and apply towards achieving our vision for the South Rift. Another meeting followed, this time in an NGO office in Nairobi. A small group of Maasai leaders gathered from across the landscape, discussing what entity to form to drive forward the vision created in Magadi. They agreed upon an association of land owners, and chose John Kamanga to lead this exciting new entity tasked with achieving their Vision.

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Since then, SORALO’s journey – and our approach to pursuing our vision - has taken many twists and turns, evolving and learning at every bend. Our initial ideas focussed on adding value to the landscape for our communities through tourism. We began working with Shompole and Olkiramatian, two communities who were already trying out different tourism ventures and drawing on Maasai land management techniques to develop their own approach to conservation - a term that was fairly new to the landscape, but grounded in practices that have existed for generations. Over time, however, SORALO and our communities realised that we needed to expand our focus if we were to speed up our impact and avoid losing the very landscape we were serving from under our feet.

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We began to consider the landscape itself, to address the rapidly changing nature of land tenure and to understand and prepare for the changes that were coming . In doing so, we saw that our team, our actions and our funding needed to expand and diversify - and that all this needed a new roadmap to guide it. With that, SORALO embarked on creating its first significant strategic plan, soliciting support, advice and opinions from a wide group of people and arriving this time at a much deeper understanding of what a landscape-based and community-based organisation really means. A great strength of Maasai people, at least in the Southern Rift, lies in choosing how to adapt and evolve: welcoming what is useful but never letting go of important values and traditions. In part because of this, Maasai culture has survived – and been defended, maintained, and adapted – over centuries.

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While the most recent arrivals of technology such as motorbikes or mobile phones have made life easier for communities living across a vast landscape, they have been absorbed into – rather than changed - a pre-existing way of life. In many ways, SORALO as an organisation mirrors this same strength. Over the past twenty years, we have grown, learned and changed immensely. We have embraced new ideas, listened to different voices and innovated new tools. However, at every step of our journey, we have stood firmly in our foundations in Maasai communities, culture and values, which continue to guide every decision we make.

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