Dr. Lucy King, a HGB Innovation Grant recipient, has spearheaded a groundbreaking endeavor focused on environmentalism, climate change, and human-animal coexistence on a multitude of scales. She leads Save the Elephants’ Human-Elephant Coexistence Program, which is run from Kenya. Its goal is to make amicable coexistence between the communities and their surrounding wildlife. Dr. King has placed huge emphasis on centering women in these efforts and making sure that they are equipped with the proper background knowledge and education to significantly contribute to this mission and make a living for themselves. 

This program is important for numerous reasons, but one highlight is that it gives the tools to women to be self-sufficient and make money for themselves; it gives them a way to generate wealth and protect their communities. Dr. King was recently able to make a stop in NYC to meet with the HGB team while in the US on a work trip. She discussed with us the dynamics present within the communities she works in, as well as the program itself. In Kenya, one of the largest issues faced by the women in communities is their lack of access to proper education. It keeps them dependent on the men for their resources and doesn’t allow them autonomy in many areas of their life. In the past, many hadn’t been given many opportunities to plan and strategize on such a large level, which is why Dr. King was very eager about intentional involvement specifically with women. She tackled the question of how to access these women who were so incredibly underrepresented by making them the powerhouse forces behind the beekeeping and honey harvesting that generates money for families from their beehive fences that are protecting their farms from elephant crop-raids (see this link for Lucy’s TED Talk about her project on how bees are helping elephants keep the peace with farmers). 

Dr. King made sure that at the initial bee-keeping training sessions she hosted in Kenya, it wasn’t just men being trained, though they responded with the most interest in the beginning. She wanted both the men and women to be properly educated and trained so that everyone would possess the skillset necessary to profit from having these beehives around their farms and in their community. Dr. King spends a lot of her efforts ensuring that there is intentional focus on empowering women, her goal being to show women that they are more than capable of accomplishing these goals and tasks for themselves. This new job of beekeeping and harvesting the honey broadens the horizons of their own personal self-perception. 

Human-Elephant Coexistence Toolbox:

We are so proud to share that Dr. King recently created, launched, and published a new Human-Elephant Coexistence Toolbox book, which is a step-by-step guide to different methods and mechanisms capturing all aspects that best amplify safe human-elephant coexistence. She began this project in April of 2020, when the pandemic first hit, as a laptop project she could work on while in lock down, and since the human-elephant coexistence project has exploded across the continent! It’s picking up traction across the various countries and communities who suffer from tumultuous relationships with the surrounding wildlife and will be presented to government delegates at the international CITES CoP27 conference in Panama in November 2022.

“This is my contribution to show people that you can live well, healthily, and profitably from living in the same space with elephants without touching them or using the animal itself as a resource for exploitation. This is being distributed all around Africa, it’s literally a tool box of how to live with elephants, designed for project officer and community leader level with enough substance in there to be science based but it’s also highly illustrative for those who are less literate.”

Dr. King’s toolbox book teaches how to make a living by protecting communities, elephants and the environment. It’s careful consideration of illustration and design allows anyone to pick up the booklet and understand different methods depending on access to various resources.

Drought in Africa:

Kenya is currently experiencing a devastating drought, and has been for months now, not always garnering the needed media coverage in the US national news. “It’s everything we’re talking about right now. It’s affecting all of us. We’re losing elephants by the day.” Dr King informed us. They are not just losing elephants, but the large cattle herds and buffalo have also been massively depleted. The drought is so bad, it’s been declared an official famine in Somalia. Dr King continues “You look at things and you go ‘This is a disaster’ but there’s also opportunities here. We looked at the opportunity that people were not busy on their farms so we decided to just pack the weeks with training events for everyone as fast as we can so the farmers and women are ready and empowered with new enterprise activities that are not rain-dependent.”

There were also a lot of retired community health volunteers wanting to be re-trained, so Dr King’s team leveraged this extra time they had to do so. Eleven community health volunteers were put through a 10-day professional training course, which resulted in a certificate at the end of the program, along with a uniform to wear. These women now go around the village, chatting and helping people as needed with health and family planning needs. This important status has transformed these women into public health spokespeople for the village in many ways, allowing them to become leaders in their communities where they may not have been able to before due to their lack of access to education for themselves.

Dr. Lucy King’s work at Save the Elephants not only protects communities from elephant devastation, but also protects elephants against human interference, retaliation, and ultimately harm. She has been able to use her background in science to ideate a mutually beneficial mechanism for both humans and elephants. The women in the communities where this is present have largely been mobilized and enriched by this newfound purpose. They have found multiple ways to stream income and make a living for themselves. Though COVID-19 and the drought have been huge unexpected obstacles, Dr. King and her team have been able to pivot to the challenge and leverage the opportunities that arose from it. The infrastructure and capacity building taking place currently, with funding from the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation, will ensure that these programs will be sustainable in the long run.