Wildlife Conservation Leases are Considerable Conservation Options outside Protected Areas: The Kitengela - Nairobi National Park Wildlife Conservation Lease Program

. It is one of Kenya’s most visited Parks, located at the boundary of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city. The NNP is fenced on the northern boundary to separate it from the Nairobi metropolis as well as to the eastern and western boundaries. The southern boundary which lies along the Empakasi River is open and adjoins the Kitengela, an area of 390 km 2 . Kitengela is one of the three triangles that comprise the larger wildlife dispersal area for NNP called the Athi-Kaputiei Plains (AKP), an area of 2200 km 2 . The rangelands of AKP are private land, majority of it owned by the pastoral Maasai, who have historically shared their land with wildlife [1]. The Nairobi National Park together with AKP comprise the AthiKaputiei Ecosystem (AKE) whose limits are bounded by the Rift Valley escarpment to the west, the Nairobi-Mombasa railway line to the east and the Konza-Magadi railway line to the south (Figure 1). The area is dry and the annual rainfall increases from 500 mm in the southeast to 800 mm in the northwest. The AKE ecosystem support 24 species of resident large mammals, but the park itself is too small to support viable populations of most of the large herbivores. Consequently, some herbivore species such as the wildebeest (ConnochaetestaurinusBurchell), zebra (EquusBurchelliGray) and eland (Taurotragusoryx) use the park as a dry season (June-November) refuge and disperse to the private land in the AKP in the wet season (MarchMay) for forage and calving. The AKP is the traditional home to the Kaputiei Maasai pastoralists, whose main livelihood is livestock production, keeping cattle, sheep and goats in the vast plains. When NNP was established in 1946, the Kitengela plains were declared but never formally gazzetted as a wildlife conservation area. In the mid-1970s, land in the AKP was privatized with the creation of the Kitengela Group Ranch covering an area of 18,292 ha (45,200 acres) and collectively owned by 215 members of the Maasai community. In 1988, the Kitengela Group Ranch was sub-divided into individual plots of roughly 215 acres allocated to each of the 250 members. The process of land privatization and sub-division followed in the entire Kajiado County as the Maasai landowners passed on plots to several inheritors, and increased land sales mostly to non-Maasai’s interested in agriculture [2]. The land sales, alongside rapid increase in