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When the dry season empties the waterholes, the foundation hires bowsers and fills them. On one World Elephant Day alone, that meant 88,000 litres into Tsavo East.
02About this project
Kenya's dry seasons decide which animals live. Waterholes shrink to cracked mud, troughs run empty, and wildlife walks further and further for a drink, often into conflict with people. Where a park cannot hold water through a drought, the foundation trucks it in.
On World Elephant Day in August 2020 the foundation hired seven bowsers carrying 88,000 litres into Tsavo East, where Kenya's largest elephant population lives, and used them to fill three waterholes, a mud pit and three water troughs. Thirty young people from Stand Up Shout Out travelled from Nairobi to Voi to do the work, on a day that also fell on Youth Day, with the Kenya Wildlife Service providing collaboration and security. In September 2021 the foundation returned to Tsavo with eight bowsers and 96,000 litres, filling troughs and a waterhole that had dried out completely.
The hardest test came with the drought of early 2023, in Nairobi National Park. For two months the foundation worked in a coalition with Friends of Nairobi National Park, BAPS Charity, the PKF Foundation and SUSO, with the Kenya Wildlife Service facilitating, to keep water and fodder going into the park. One March delivery alone brought 77,000 litres of water and 450 bales of hay, and the final run filled a desilted dam just before the rains arrived. Over those two months the coalition, backed by a long list of individual donors, delivered 1.2 million litres of water, 2,064 bales of hay and 203 bales of lucerne into the park. The figure belongs to all of them together; the foundation was one part of it.