Opening Classrooms to the Wild

For many children growing up around Amboseli, the national park is part of the landscape of home. Yet for some, it remains a place they have never entered.

They encounter wildlife outside its boundaries, see safari vehicles moving towards it and still experience a great paradox of conservation where they grow up beside an extraordinary natural resource and still have very little opportunity to experience it for themselves.

That is the gap Conservation Kenya’s Mazingira Trips Programme was created to bridge.

The idea emerged from our work in schools where we were teaching students about trees, wildlife, climate change, water conservation and the importance of protecting their environment. However, we began to recognize that knowledge alone was not enough.

The children needed to see the very ecosystem we were asking them to understand and protect.

For many participants, a Mazingira Trip offers their first opportunity to enter Amboseli National Park and experience it at close range. This journey changes the nature of the lesson.

A conversation about habitat stops being abstract when students can look across the plains and see how vegetation, water and wildlife depend upon one another.

During each one-day educational excursion, students observe wildlife, explore different habitats and begin to understand Amboseli as an interconnected living system. These trips create an opportunity to discuss wildlife movement and the space animals need to survive.

A shrinking water source often leads to a conversation about drought, climate change and competition for limited resources.

Changes in vegetation help students understand why healthy habitats matter and the presence of communities and wildlife within the same wider landscape opens a discussion about coexistence and sustainable land use.

These lessons carry a particular weight because the students learn about their own backyard.

The park, the wildlife and the environmental pressures surrounding it are part of the same landscape in which their families live, keep livestock, attend school and build their futures.

As such, conservation cannot easily become a source of pride, responsibility or opportunity if the young people living closest to it experience it only from a distance.

A child who enters the park begins to see it differently. It becomes a place of discovery, a source of knowledge and a landscape connected to livelihoods, tourism, science and careers. Ultimately it becomes something that belongs within their own understanding of home.

The Mazingira Trips also recognizes students who have demonstrated commitment to caring for trees planted through CHD’s school greening work.

Keeping a seedling alive in Amboseli’s dry conditions requires patience and consistency. Students must water it, protect it and continue caring for it long after the excitement of planting has passed. The trip therefore becomes both a reward and a continuation of their learning.

After the game drive, students visit Oldonyo Musa Camp, where they explore CHD’s indigenous tree nursery and see how young trees are propagated and nurtured before they are distributed to their schools for planting.

Here, the lesson comes full circle as they grasp how the trees, they care for at school are connected to the wider health of Amboseli, providing shade, protecting soil, supporting biodiversity and contributing, over time, to the habitats on which wildlife depends

The Mazingira Trips Programme closes the distance between young people and the natural heritage that surrounds them helping turn familiarity into understanding and proximity into participation.

This helps children see that conservation is something happening around them, something that affects their lives and something in which they can have a role.

In 2024, CHD conducted six Mazingira Trips, each involving approximately 30 students. Altogether, 180 students and 18 teachers participated in experiences designed to deepen understanding of wildlife behavior, habitat preservation, climate change, sustainable land use and water conservation.

What is seen and discussed during the trip can return to classrooms, environmental clubs and school conservation activities building a knowledge bank that extends beyond the students who travelled and gradually strengthens conservation understanding across the wider school community.

Once students they have seen it, understood it and recognized their own place within it, conservation begins to become a reality.