Simon Nkoitoi tells the story of his path to becoming a wildlife conservationist

0:00Welcome to Wild Chronicles. Today, we are honored to interview a prominent figure in wildlife conservation, hailing from the Maasai Mara, Kenya. Just as Simba Oloshorua Qiang Zhuo once said, "Throughout world history, it has always been a few pioneers who first carved new paths to make the world safer and more beautiful, paving the way for many others to follow." In the heart of the the Maasai Mara, among the rolling grasslands and ancient trails of wildlife, one such pioneer walks quietly but purposefully, Simon Nikoi-Toi. With a heart rooted in tradition and eyes set on the future, he has spent his life guiding both people and nature toward harmony. There There is no doubt Simon is one of those few who dared to lead the way.

0:55Simon Nikoi Toy is a renowned wildlife conservationist and educator in Kenya. A proud Maasai, he was born and raised in the Maasai Mara. He began his career as a school teacher before dedicating many years to friends of conservation, where he deepened his commitment to community-driven conservation. He went on to found the Koyaki Guiding School, the first safari guiding school in Kenya, aimed at empowering local youth with professional opportunities in ecotourism and conservation. In 2015, Simon became the chief warden of Ol Kinyay Conservancy, where his leadership has played a key role in preserving one of the most biodiverse areas in the Mara region.

1:38Simon and Koi Toi and Qiang Zhuo, also known as Simba, became close friends during Simon's tenure at Ol'Kinye. They share a deep passion for wildlife conservation and a firm belief in the power of community-based conservation as the future of protecting Africa's natural heritage. Simba began supporting Ol'Kinye Conservancy in 2012 through a wide range of initiatives, promoting ecotourism, constructing lion-proof bonas to reduce human wildlife conflict, donating vehicles, motorcycles, and other essential equipment to assist rangers and supporting various community projects. Together, Simon and Simba have worked tirelessly to elevate Old Kinyei into one of the best managed protected areas in the world, IUCN Greenlist 2018.

2:28Simon and Koi Toy believes that Simba's new book, Mara Safari Guide, will be an important tool for helping people understand the Maasai Mara more deeply. He hopes it will inspire more visitors to experience this remarkable land firsthand and join in the efforts to protect the Mara ecosystem and its incredible diversity of wildlife. I'm Simon Koitoi, the senior warden of Ol Kinyei Conservancy in the Greater Mara ecosystem in Kenya. My background is teaching and I ended up from being a class teacher to a conservationist, to a senior warden.

3:16So we look at the two different things. And I was born in a place called Entara, in Arok, Entara means Papada. So I think the area must have had a lot of poverty at the time. So I was born in 1963, so I'm definitely 60 years old, and I started going to primary school during a time when actually even wearing short trousers was a problem. We used to wear Maasai shukas, go to school, and going to school was taking us so many kilometers to walk from home very early in the morning, to school through land, terrain where there are a lot of wildlife, there are thorns, we didn't have shoes, so we have to run every day.

4:18So I believe it must have been very healthy to do that at the time, although we didn't know that it was healthy. So we would go to school. We started meeting, associating with other children. We didn't know them. Teachers, we didn't know them. So we didn't know what the school is. So we were taken through classes, sitting on the floor. And it was a challenge because children of different backgrounds and some could not speak Ma, Ma Shai. So it It was a challenge, I could not speak Swahili or Nor English, so a lot was being taught in using the sign language.

5:00So then we continued, we started writing words on earth, dust, using our fingers and then finally counting, we used sticks and it was abandoned, we could get very nice sticks from home, well cut and into good sizes that you can hold them and go to school and count them. And Mother Mati was not a problem with the Maasai boys because during the herding of cows and goats and sheep, then you could be asked how many sheep are there, how many goats are there.

5:40So Mother Mati was easy to know. So we continued, the system modification at the time was 7 after class 7, you go to primary school for 7 years and then you go to junior secondary school to do KGAC, it was called Kenya Junior Secondary Examination, then now you go to high school. So we stayed in Ololonga Primary School until I completed. I went to Kilgore's Secondary School in 1978.

6:24Then to be in Secondary School was another experience because I was staying away from home. We went, it was not a boarding school, it was a day school, and very far we could not sleep home. we had to rent small houses. Money was a problem. You know, to send money up to the school was really a challenge, because either somebody has to bring money, three days walking to school, or you have to come all the way to home, walking as well, and you have to sleep in between villages to come and get money to go to school. So that was life at the time and we got used to and it was nice you know I ended up loving history doing history in nature and Kiswahili a bit of it and English literature so we continued and in the way along the way there were a lot of challenges of paying school fees. So, and not because the parents were very poor, but because, you know, there was that sort of ignorant of school, not knowing, you know, sometimes we are sent home, and the parents were very happy that we are sent home. Then we were located to look after the cows as they rest when we are there. So we wasted a lot of time in between the school and home because of a fist. So we continued and then completed from 41981 then that was it.

8:10We thought now that was the end of education. Then I went to after coming home then I stayed a few months I went to join my friends in one of the camps at the time which was called Marabufalo I got some casual work, you know, of working, you know, to prepare the airstrip, putting on the morgue with some guys who could wake up very early in the morning and do the work. Then, to the position of teaching, was advertised, together was the need of some youth to go enjoying the Rangers to work as Rangers in the Mara National Reserve. And I did board.

9:05Then I was selected both as a teacher and then I also qualified as a Ranger. But then I chose to be a teacher. I lived Rangers. Then I was posted to a place called Naikara 1982. That was September. Where I started teaching. And at the time I didn't go to teacher's training college, but there was some sort of training, some in-house training by the ministry on how to prepare your lesson plans, lesson notes, games of work, different books and then yeah we really became a teacher and the government was paying me at the time so we were called UT and trained teachers and after one and a half years I joined a college call Mossoriate Teacher Training College for a certificate course for two years as a teacher.

10:17So after qualifying, I was posted back to Narok, my home district, and then I was posted now again to a school called Aitong Primary School, which is in the Mara landscape. I taught there for one year and I was very excited now that I've finished, I've got my teaching certificates and teacher service commission number. So I was a registered teacher by the Ministry of Education and I was very excited to come and use the skills that I learned in college to teach kids and really excel. I introduced games, games ball, athletics, music. So then now the government had to promote me to head a primary school in a place called Aitong, not Aitong sorry, in Talek. That was still in the Mara ecosystem. So I started a younger school after grade three, and the school had challenges. It was Bill of Timber. You know, there were no other teachers from the government apart from me, so I had to mobilize the community to agree to contribute some money so that we can employ some four leavers to teach young children.

11:46So I continued like that and the school started growing and because of my involvement with music, with game balls and co-curricular activities, there were a lot of children coming now because The children who were in school could go and imitate what they learned in school and tell the other children how nice it is to be in school, to play soccer balls, though those are improvised from plastics and they were very happy and the music and the books and the pictures and drawings so it attracted so many children and the parents started liking me And well, I became a head teacher for seven years.

12:35Then the government now promoted me to become what they call at the time, TAKTUTA. That is Teacher Advisor Center Tutor. Now my role then was to advise teachers on new curriculum development. If there is anything new in school, then I was to the advice teachers. And I worked there for three months and I found that it was not really very good, it was sort of a boring job. The distance from one school to another one was massive miles and miles, so I could not really gather teachers, there was no transport, the roads were in a pathetic situation, so I could not really mobilize teachers and bring them for training.

13:30Then I felt sorry, then I declined the job. Then after three months, those advertisement and organization that came in called Friends of Conservation or in short FOC. And their objective was actually to work in the MARA ecosystem to introduce conservation. One of the components in conservation was environmental education, those also elements of ecological monitoring, those also elements of rhino programming and rhino monitoring.

14:17Then I was employed and then I became a team leader for all the programs, although I was directly in charge of environmental education with so many schools in the Mara, and that now was the beginning of my conservation career. Then I was involving teachers, young children, teaching them about conservation, about nature, about the environment, about wildlife, and children also started developing interest. And, well, I worked for Friends of Conservation.

14:57I started also learning, reading a lot of books, travelling, you know, a lot of seminars, workshops, and I went to, in between, my working with Friends of Conservation. I went to the United States of America just on sort of environmental issues sponsored by the US government, went to several states to see how conservation is done, how it's managed, what's all about conservation there, why many people are investing a lot of money back in Africa, not in their own country.

15:40I realized because they don't want us to make the mistakes that they made by, you know, clearing the forest, hunting the animals until they are finished. So then came back. I worked now to expand more schools, to include high schools. So I was actually now in charge of 26 schools, and at the time, the schools were many miles apart so I could travel you know I pitch up my tent in school talk to the teachers of the normal class teaching so that we have what is called conservation clubs and it was one of the most active clubs in all the schools children develop interest started organizing for the tour to the the Mara to see wildlife, to visit lodges, to see what's happening, and there was interest.

16:43So I worked for Friends of Conservation in the Education Department, Environmental Education for 11 years. Then when I was living, I did a research on the impact of the school's work that we have done for 11 years. And I came to realize that most of the students who are conservation club members actually have ended up joining also conservation aspects. Some of them went as guides. Some of them went as rangers and all that.

17:25So they ended up in that field. So, which is a credit as an effort of my contribution. So, from there, I left after working for that in many years. I joined a company and organization called Woodland Trust, which I worked for only one year. And my role at the time was to talk to people and promote trees for woodland, for establishment of woodlands or trees for sale, for making money. Well, we have learned when I was in FOSI that you plant trees to have good environment, good air, good everything by trees. But again, you can plant trees and you have it. So that That was my work and well, I didn't really achieve a lot because where I was working at the time, more people wanted to go to farming.

18:31So instead of planting trees for commercial purposes, they were clearly planting wheat farms and maize farms and so it didn't work very well. And they were also looking at it's so many years waiting about six years to harvest and wanted things that is three months six months and so forth. So then I also saw that I was not making a big impact. Then we came to start now a school to teach the youth on tour guiding and to operation. And the reason of doing that, we saw that in the Mara, most of the local people did not actually join the guiding. As the people who guided and talked to tourists about the culture of the Maasai, the culture of people of Kenya, the history of Kenya, the geography of Kenya.

19:34So it was people who are not even who do not know about wildlife and they came to not to give the right information and also the youth were not getting jobs. So we started as school to teach the youth on tour guiding and tour operation and which was training for a one-year certificate course and you can imagine the local people had knowledge in wildlife. They just wanted to know how to apply it in a very formal way, where people will enjoy. We know that they are very happy coming to Maurato, coming to Kenya, paying a lot of money worth what they have learned. So we started it. And at the beginning it was a bit of a challenge because we also wanted girls.

20:25But many locals thought that the industry was so much of a man's dominated industry. So we talked to people around villages until we were able to get only three girls. After training for the whole year, these girls were immediately employed by CAMHS. This upmarket CAMHS, 'cause they are very co-friendly, they love to promote girls and all that. And after about six months, these girls were so experts that they could drive guests alone, they could change a tire loan, They could talk to clients by themselves.

21:14And now we broke, then the old culture was broken. So now we had more many girls applying, joining and becoming tour guides. Some of them have become the best. Some of them finally actually has been able to make good money out of salary and out of their work and are able to educate their sisters, their brothers. and then it was very good. So I was very happy. And then now when we had so many youth in the field, almost the whole course is saturated.

21:55Then we started thinking of adding more courses in wildlife management, hospitality, like a kitchenry, you know, how to make rooms and all that. So then when I put everything in place, then now I went back to school, to Maasai Mara University to do social work or community development. Then I left the school when they are developing all their careers, their other courses, which I'm very happy that they were implemented.

22:35And the school now started teaching other courses. They were doing very well and I was very happy because that was my initiative. After the university went to do social work, I came to work in Old King Air Conservancy as a senior warden. So now from being a teacher to a warden, my role now is starting managing wildlife, managing people, the rangers working with the community and building, you know, making sure that the habitat is protected, wildlife protected. I came when a lot of poaching was happening, then we have to really do a lot, you know, to change the way the consequence was being ran.

23:30And then now we have to work very hard for three years. We were able to completely stop poaching. So there was no poaching at all. We continued. The community was benefiting from the income generating and wildlife population went up, habitat flourished. And 2018, the Conservancy was rated by IUCN as a green list, which is a big award. We were only three in Kenya and we are very happy and still working for Kinye with a lot of passion working with community, working with rangers and we manage to put the conservancy into the top conservation area well managed in the whole of Africa. I should say in the whole world and our conservancy we do have A few camps which actually generate money to pay for the leasing of land which belong to the Maasai and We we the camps it tended come has good 3/10 not 3/10 but 6/10 so accommodate up to 12 maximum people and We put a player a system that for every, for every tent, every tent represents 700 acres so that we don't, you know, over saturated camps in the conservancy. And the company's vehicles are beige in color, they are environmentally friendly. So, and we don't have other company, the only company that is leasing the concerns from the local community is game-watchers, safaris and porines, safari cams.

25:42So all the cams are porrini and they are made significant partnering with the community by through employment of all our employees and the local mass size from the cams, the the managers, the management, and all that. And apart from employment, that's another benefit and leasing. Now, we work to introduce other corporate and social responsibility activities. We have bee hives with the youth and women.

26:25We also have milk coolant where women sell milk, they buy and chill milk and sell. So, honey is sold to the company, the Mocha Safari. And that partnership continues. It is really very good. So, I'm happy. That is how my life started. From childhood to being a teacher, to being a conservationist, and now I'm still a conservationist. So, I'm very happy and my passion lives forever. - Thank you very much. And it's also very important to note that conservation has not really expert.

27:11Conservation is a learning process. You keep learning every time. The rangers teaches you. You know, the community teaches you. Nature teaches you. You also find things that you have never known that have never been documented in books. So conservation is very important. and conservation is forever. So it's very important. The other thing that is very important to note is that wildlife do not belong to any country. Wildlife do not belong to any conservancy. Wildlife do not belong to any national reserve.

27:52They belong to the ecosystem. They do not know boundaries. They do not know where they belong to. It's as human being who have interfered with the migratory root, with the way of life, and then animal has to sometimes have to adopt to new way of life because of people, population pressure, because of the interference, and so forth.