01
Parthenium chokes the grasslands of Nairobi National Park. The foundation put 130 people to work pulling it out, and paid them, in a year when work had vanished.
02About this project
Parthenium is an invasive weed that spreads fast through open grassland, crowding out the grasses that grazing wildlife depends on. It had begun to take hold in Nairobi National Park, and the only reliable way to remove it is by hand.
In June 2020 the foundation sponsored an operation to do exactly that. A hundred and thirty people went into the park to uproot the weed: the Maniago team, young volunteers from Stand Up Shout Out and residents of the Kibera settlement. Kenya Wildlife Service rangers protected them throughout, and the exercise was repeated twice a week over the following months.
It did two jobs at once. The work paid a small wage at a moment when the pandemic had wiped out livelihoods, and it took people into a park on their own doorstep that most of them had never been inside. They saw lions, rhino, giraffe and antelope in the course of a working day. Kenyan guides who had lost their own work joined the effort too, among them four of Maniago's own.
The removals have continued as a partnership. On World Environment Day in June 2022, SUSO, Maniago Safaris and the Kenya Wildlife Service cleared the murram pits between points 8 and 9 in the park, pulling out 611 kilogrammes of parthenium with more than eighty participants on the day.