Community-Based Tourism in Kenya: Who Is Actually Receiving Safari Revenue and What the Borana Conservancy Model Gets Right

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Kenya’s safari sector generated KSh 460 billion, approximately $3.5 billion, in tourism revenue in 2024, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service. Of that total, 75% came from wildlife-based tourism. The Maasai Mara, Amboseli, Samburu, and the Laikipia Plateau each received their share of that flow. The animals that made that revenue possible, the lions, the elephants, the black rhinos, the Grevy’s zebras, live on land that belongs to communities whose compensation from that economic activity is, in most cases, structurally inadequate and inconsistently delivered.

This is not a new observation. The Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association (KWCA) reported that in 2016, community wildlife conservancies, which constitute 17.3% of Kenya’s land surface and provide critical dispersal and migratory habitat for wildlife, earned only 1.39% of total national tourism revenue. In May 2025, KWS Director General Dr Erustus Kanga publicly called for a formula that would route 10% of total tourism revenue to local communities, describing wildlife as the communities’ asset and framing the current distribution as structurally inequitable. Speaking at a human-wildlife conflict compensation event in Kajiado, Dr Kanga stated: “We are rooting for a formula for local communities to get 10 percent of the total revenue. We will make this money the locals’ ‘cow’ to milk.” According to Daily Nation reporting on the KWS announcement, this proposal has not yet been formally implemented.

Against this national picture, a small number of conservancies have built genuine community benefit models that demonstrably work. Borana Conservancy in Laikipia County is the most instructive. This article examines what Borana has actually built, what its ten-year vision commits to, and what it tells tourism boards and investors about the structural difference between conservation tourism that returns value to communities and conservation tourism that does not.

Kenya’s wildlife conservancies cover 17.3% of the country’s land surface and are critical to the survival of species that generate billions in safari revenue. In 2016, they earned 1.39% of total national tourism revenue. The gap between those two numbers is the structural problem that the Borana model is designed to answer.

The Kenya Conservancy Landscape: What Community-Based Tourism Actually Means

Kenya has approximately 160 community conservancies operating across its wildlife-rich landscapes, according to the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association. These conservancies protect wildlife corridors and habitats outside the formal national park system, functioning as private wildlife reserves operated on community-owned land. The structural model, documented by Conservation International and the KWCA, involves communities leasing their land to safari and conservation operators for a set monthly or annual fee. The land is managed for the benefit of wildlife; communities receive the lease income; and safari operators build and run the lodges that generate the revenue that pays the leases.

When this model works, it works because of a direct financial alignment between the community’s income and the wildlife asset’s health. A community receiving predictable monthly lease payments from a conservancy has a material reason to cooperate with rangers, report poaching, accept restrictions on grazing, and resist land conversion. In the Maasai Mara ecosystem, Conservation International reports that landowners in functioning conservancies earn an average of $350 per month from land leases, equivalent to a graduate salary in Kenya. The 24 conservancies in the Mara ecosystem collectively protect 180,000 hectares, effectively doubling the wildlife habitat available beyond the Maasai Mara National Reserve boundaries.

When the model fails, it fails for three documented reasons. The first is inadequate lease payments that do not compensate communities for the opportunity cost of restricting land use for wildlife. The second is delayed or inconsistent payment, which erodes trust and incentive. The third is governance failure within the conservancy structure itself, where benefits accrue to management rather than being distributed to landowners. The KWCA’s 2024 Annual Report identifies governance and financial management as the primary areas requiring improvement across the conservancy network. The lesson is not that the model is flawed. It is the structural design that determines whether the model produces conservation outcomes or only conservation marketing.

What Borana Has Actually Built: The Specific Structures That Work

Borana Conservancy spans 32,000 acres on the Laikipia Plateau at the foot of Mount Kenya. It was established from a cattle and sheep ranch passed through three generations of the Dyer family. Borana Lodge was built in 1993 as the revenue mechanism to fund conservation, making it one of Kenya’s earliest private conservation-tourism operations. The conservancy’s foundational design principle, confirmed in its current ten-year plan published on boranaconservancy.com, is that tourism revenue funds conservation and community development simultaneously rather than sequentially. The lodge does not generate profit first and give back second. Community investment is structural, not philanthropic.

The Borana Conservancy reports a 100% local employment rate across its operations, which is independently confirmed by Borgen Magazine’s community-driven conservation analysis. The conservancy provides employment, pensions, and health insurance to over 400 members of its immediate community. Its anti-poaching team is entirely locally recruited, which the conservancy treats as a deliberate strategy: rangers who come from neighbouring communities carry a different authority within those communities than rangers deployed from outside. The last recorded poaching incident at Borana was in 2014, according to Borgen Magazine’s review of the conservancy’s conservation record.

Beyond employment, Borana operates several documented community benefit programmes. The Borana Livestock to Market Programme, launched in 2016 with support from The Kenyan Market Trust and Borana Ranch Limited, has generated $433,536 in sales, benefiting approximately 600 community members, according to Borgen Magazine’s June 2024 review. The scheme allows community members to bring cattle to the conservancy for vetted, weighed, and identified sale at KES 130 per kg live weight, with a maximum of 20 cattle per individual to ensure equitable distribution. The Borana Education Support Programme funds bursaries, faculty, and facilities in surrounding schools. A mobile clinic has operated in partnership with the Ministry of Health since 2005, providing basic healthcare, antenatal care, immunisations, HIV/AIDS awareness, and family planning to neighbouring communities.

The Lewa-Borana Landscape: Conservation at Scale

In 2014, Borana and the neighbouring Lewa Wildlife Conservancy removed the fence between their properties to create the Lewa-Borana Landscape (LBL), a continuous protected area that also incorporates the Ngare Ndare Forest and spans over 94,000 acres. The LBL now constitutes one of East Africa’s largest continuous rhino habitats, supporting over 250 black and white rhinos. In 2013, Borana reintroduced 21 black rhinos, the first time rhinos had roamed the land in more than 50 years. The rhino population within the LBL has grown at birth rates that occasionally exceed 9%, according to Borana Conservancy’s official conservation reports.

The LBL also hosts African wild dogs, Grevy’s zebras, Jackson’s hartebeests, cheetahs, elephants, lions, leopards, reticulated giraffes, and buffalo. The conservancy works closely with Save the Rhino International, For Rangers, the Kenya Wildlife Service, and Lewa Wildlife Conservancy on anti-poaching and biological management. Dams have been constructed within the conservancy to create water sources that encourage rhinos to distribute themselves more evenly across available habitat, reducing intra-species competition and expanding the effective carrying capacity. The ecosystem is also pursuing UNESCO World Heritage Site status as a long-term conservation and destination credentialing goal.

All lodges and houses on Borana are powered by solar farms with a combined total output of over 300 KVA, according to Earth.Org’s review of Borana’s sustainability infrastructure. The conservancy operates a recycling eco-centre at its headquarters, has eliminated single-use plastics, and measures its carbon footprint monthly against a target of carbon neutrality. A glass crusher at the eco-centre produces eco-concrete for buildings. These infrastructure decisions are not marketing claims. They are operational commitments with documented outputs that address the sustainability credentialing problem posed by the EU’s greenwashing regulations from September 2026 for any African conservation tourism operator that cannot document its environmental management.

The Structural Question: Which Models Actually Return Value and Why

The Borana model is not the only functioning community benefit model in Kenya, but it is one of the most comprehensively documented. The Maasai Mara conservancy network, the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, Ol Pejeta Conservancy, and Il N’gwesi, a community conservancy that Borana directly helped establish for the Maasai, each demonstrates variations of the same structural logic: tourism revenue funds conservation infrastructure, which protects the wildlife asset, which in turn sustains the tourism revenue. Breaking any link in that chain degrades the model. The IFAW analysis published in September 2025 makes the distributional argument directly: community wildlife conservancies cover 17.3% of Kenya’s land area and provide critical habitat dispersal, yet, as recently as 201,6, received only 1.39% of national tourism revenue. The structural injustice documented there is not a historical footnote. It is a current condition.

What Borana gets right structurally is the integration of community benefit into the operational model rather than positioning it as a downstream distribution. Employment is not a CSR programme. It is the operational model: 100% of ranger positions are locally filled, and rangers receive pensions and health insurance. The Livestock to Market Programme is not a charity. It is a revenue mechanism that uses the conservancy’s existing infrastructure, veterinary capacity, and market access to create value for community livestock owners. The mobile health clinic is not a donation. It was established in 2005 in partnership with the Kenya Ministry of Health as a permanent service infrastructure that the conservancy sustains through its tourism revenue. Each of these is a structured, recurring commitment rather than a discretionary annual allocation.

For tourism boards and destination investors, the lesson from this analysis is not that Borana is perfect or that its model is universally replicable. The question to ask of any conservation tourism investment is not how much revenue the operation generates,s but how the revenue flows are structured. A conservancy that generates $5 million annually and routes 2% to communities creates less of a conservation incentive than one that generates $1 million and routes 30% with predictable payment schedules. The volume of revenue is less important than the reliability and structure of the community’s claim on it.

The National Picture: Kenya’s Tourism Revenue and the Distribution Problem

Kenya’s national tourism strategy, launched on Jamhuri Day in December 2025, explicitly links wildlife conservation, sustainability, and community benefit as co-equal objectives, according to reporting by Africa Sustainability Matters. The strategy acknowledges that protected areas cover about 8% of Kenya’s land and support an estimated 35% of national wildlife populations, and that revenues from park fees and conservancies fund ranger salaries, anti-poaching operations, and community projects. It also acknowledges that climate change, human-wildlife conflict, and land fragmentation are raising conservation costs and eroding habitats.

The Kenya Wildlife Service reported that in the 2024/25 financial year, its own revenue had nearly doubled from KSh 4 billion in 2022 to KSh 8 billion, yet KWS still faces a funding deficit of over KSh 11 billion against its annual operational needs, according to Huduma Global’s February 2026 analysis of KWS funding. Approximately 72% of KWS’s annual budget is consumed by personnel costs, leaving minimal resources for infrastructure development, equipment, and conservation programmes. The KWS Director General’s May 2025 call for communities to receive 10% of total national tourism revenue sits in this context: a system where the central conservation authority is underfunded, communities receive a fraction of the value generated by wildlife on their land, and private conservancies are among the few functioning mechanisms that structurally align community income with conservation outcomes.

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The RCA Argument: Structure Is the Intervention

Kenya’s community-based tourism debate reduces to one question that tourism boards and investors consistently avoid answering with precision: what percentage of tourism revenue reaches the community that holds the land on which the wildlife lives, in what form, through what mechanism, and on what schedule? The Borana Conservancy model answers all four components of that question. The community is identified. The revenue stream is defined. The mechanisms are operational, not aspirational. The schedule is predictable. When all four components are present and functioning, communities protect wildlife because they have a material reason to do so. When anyone is absent, the economic logic for protection weakens, and the conservation outcome degrades accordingly.

For tourism boards across East and Southern Africa, the Borana model’s transferable lesson is not the specific programmes it runs. It is the design logic that precedes them. Community benefit was not added to Borana Lodge after the lodge became profitable. It was the founding justification for the lodge’s existence. Borana Lodge was built to generate revenue to fund conservation and community development. That sequence, purpose before profit, determines everything that follows. Tourism boards evaluating which conservancy investments to support, which operators to partner with, and which models to replicate should use that sequence as the primary filter. The models that built community benefit into their operational logic before they built their first accommodation unit are the ones worth studying. The ones that added it afterwards, in the form of foundation contributions and CSR reports, are the ones worth questioning.

Visiting Borana and the Laikipia Plateau: Access and What to Expect

Borana Conservancy is located on the Laikipia Plateau in Laikipia County, approximately 200 kilometres north of Nairobi. The nearest airstrip is at Nanyuki, served by scheduled and charter flights from Wilson Airport in Nairobi, with flight times of approximately one hour. By road, Nanyuki is around four to five hours from Nairobi by 4×4 vehicle. From Nanyuki, Borana is a 2-to 30-minute drive in a conservancy transfer vehicle. The conservancy also has its own airstrip for private charter access. For operational information about the airstrip and charter options, contact Borana Lodge directly or through a licensed tour operator in Kenya.

Borana Lodge is the primary accommodation on the conservancy, offering six cottages with views across the Laikipia Plateau. Sirai House and Lengishu House are exclusive-use properties available for families or small groups seeking private conservancy access. Activities include game drives, horseback safaris, walking safaris with professional trackers, rhino tracking, and conservation experiences with the ranger team. The conservancy is open year-round, with the dry seasons of June to October and January to March generally considered the best periods for wildlife visibility.

Please check the relevant conservancy or tour operator’s website for current accommodation rates and conservation fees before booking.

Kenya operates an e-visa system for most nationalities, with applications processed online before departure. Most EU, UK, US, and Commonwealth passport holders are eligible. Entry requirements can change. Always confirm current requirements through the Kenya High Commission or embassy before travel.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How much tourism revenue does Kenya generate from safari tourism?

Kenya’s tourism sector generated KSh 460 billion, approximately $3.5 billion, in 2024, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service. Of that total, 75% was generated from wildlife-based tourism, with KSh 345 billion coming from visitors who travel specifically to observe wildlife. This represents an increase from approximately KSh 352.5 billion collected in 2023.

2. What is Borana Conservancy and where is it located?

Borana Conservancy is a 32,000-acre wildlife conservation area on the Laikipia Plateau at the foot of Mount Kenya in Laikipia County, northern Kenya. It is a protected area management entity committed to the sustainable conservation and regeneration of wildlife and rangelands while building local livelihoods. Together with the neighbouring Lewa Wildlife Conservancy and the Ngare Ndare Forest, it forms the Lewa-Borana Landscape, a continuous 94,000-acre sanctuary and one of East Africa’s largest rhino habitats. More information is available at boranaconservancy.com.

3. What community benefit does Borana Conservancy provide?

Borana provides direct employment with pensions and health insurance to over 400 community members, with a documented 100% local employment rate across its ranger and operations teams. Its Livestock to Market Programme has generated $433,536 in sales, benefiting approximately 600 community members since 2016. The Borana Education Support Programme funds bursaries, facilities, and teaching resources in surrounding schools. A mobile health clinic, established in 2005 in partnership with the Kenyan Ministry of Health, provides healthcare services,s including immunisations, antenatal care, and HIV/AIDS education to neighbouring communities. Women’s groups sell beaded products across the conservancy’s properties with all profits returned to the groups.

4. What wildlife does Borana Conservancy protect?

Borana Conservancy protects black and white rhinos, elephants, lions, leopards, cheetahs, African wild dogs, reticulated giraffes, Jackson’s hartebeests, Grevy’s zebras, buffalo, and hyenas. In 2013, 21 black rhinos were reintroduced, the first rhinos on the land for over 50 years. The Lewa-Borana Landscape now supports over 250 black and white rhinos, with birth rates at times exceeding 9%, making it one of East Africa’s most productive rhino conservation areas.

5. How does Kenya’s community conservancy model work?

Community conservancies in Kenya operate on a lease model. Communities living in wildlife-rich areas lease their land to safari and conservation operators for a set monthly or annual fee. The land is managed for the benefit of wildlife; communities receive lease income and employment opportunities, and operators run the lodges and activities that generate revenue. The Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association estimates that Kenya has approximately 160 community conservancies covering 17.3% of the national land surface.

6. Are community conservancies receiving a fair share of Kenya’s tourism revenue?

The evidence suggests not. The Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association reported that in 2016, community wildlife conservancies earned only 1.39% of total national tourism revenue despite covering 17.3% of Kenya’s land and providing critical wildlife dispersal habitat. In May 2025, the KWS Director General publicly called for a formula that routes 10% of total tourism revenue to local communities. This proposal has not been formally implemented as of the date of publication. The gap between the land communities that provide for wildlife and the revenue they receive from it, remains one of Kenya’s most significant structural conservation challenges.

7. What is the best time to visit Borana Conservancy?

Borana is open year-round. The dry seasons of June to October and January to March are generally considered the best periods for wildlife viewing, as animals concentrate around water sources and vegetation is lower, improving visibility. The long rains of April to June make some areas more difficult to access. The conservancy advises direct contact for current conditions before travel. Please check with Borana Lodge or your tour operator for current pricing and availability before booking.

Please check the relevant conservancy or tour operator’s website for current accommodation rates and conservation fees before booking.

Explore Kenya’s Conservation Circuit with RCA

Rex Clarke Adventures covers Kenya’s safari destinations, community conservancies, and conservation tourism models at editorial depth. For Laikipia guides, Maasai Mara conservancy coverage, and responsible safari planning, explore our full Kenya section at rexclarkeadventures.com.