Big Life Foundation USA

Big Life Foundation USA (“Big Life") seeks to protect and sustain East Africa's wild lands and wildlife, including one of the greatest populations of elephants left in East Africa.

As the first organization to support coordinated anti-poaching teams operating on both sides of the Kenya-Tanzania border in East Africa, Big Life recognizes that sustainable conservation can only be achieved through a community-based collaborative approach, which is at the heart of Big Life's philosophy: when conservation supports the people, the people will support conservation.

Big Life's vision is to establish a successful holistic conservation model across the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem that can be replicated throughout the African continent.

Big Life pursues its mission by utilizing innovative conservation strategies and collaborating closely with local communities, partner NGOs, national parks and government agencies.

Our model is scalable and replicable. By leveraging our partnerships, we can contiguously expand our areas of operation and provide guidance for other partners throughout Africa interested in creating the kind of community partnerships we're pioneering across the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem.

Big Life Foundation USA supports one of the largest employers of local Maasai in the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem (Big Life Kenya), helping to fund hundreds of rangers and support staff on the ground in Africa to protect wildlife and wild lands for the benefit of all. Our headquarter offices at Mbirikani Group Ranch include a mechanic garage for vehicle repair, barracks and employee housing, and administrative offices. Field operations currently feature 30 ranger outposts, 13 Land Cruisers, a rapid deployment unit, 3 tracker dogs and handlers, and 2 airplanes used for aerial surveillance. In Tanzania, we've partnered with The Nature Conservancy and Honeyguide Foundation to implement Big Life operations in critical areas along the border.

In addition to our on-the-ground programs implemented by Big Life Limited Kenya, Big Life Foundation USA collaborates with two Big Life entities outside of Africa, whose shared focus is to provide fundraising and administrative support. Big Life Foundation USA is a registered charity and has three full time employees and a Board of Directors. Big Life Foundation Canada and Big Life UK are also registered charities in their respective countries and are governed by independent Boards of Directors.

Big Life Foundation USA helps to fund Big Life Kenya's rangers, who have patrolled more than 2.5 million km across the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem, made over 3,000 arrests of wildlife criminals, and confiscated more than 3,800 illegal tools and weapons from poachers and traffickers since our inception. In addition to creating a stable work force and investing in the local community through education and scholarships, Big Life has managed to turn conservation of wildlife species into a money-making venture for the communities such that poaching and retaliatory killings have been significantly reduced.

Now that the ecosystem is known to poachers as protected, we face new challenges. One is the need to create a stable funding source so that our current area of operation continues to be successfully protected for decades to come, but also to increase our funding resources so that we may expand contiguously to adjacent areas. In particular, we need to expand our predator compensation program to additional ranches. A second challenge is related to human population expansion: as community farms encroach on wildlife migratory corridors, so will the incidences of human-wildlife conflict (HWC) increase. Our tactics must evolve to mitigate HWC as well as protect from illegal poaching.