By Mara River Water Users Association, with IUCN’s support through the BRIDGE programme.
Jane Nashipai’s path back to the Mara River Basin was not the one she planned. She had built a career as an accountant in Nairobi, far from the riverine forests of her childhood in Trans Mara. When she lost her job, she made the decision to move back home and took up work running a tree nursery at an eco-lodge. It was a steep learning curve: Jane had to learn the names of trees in the local Maa dialect, building from scratch the botanical knowledge that would soon define her second career.
Jane (kneeling right) leading a tree planting session through Women in the Wild.
All images are courtesy of MRWUA.
Then, in 2020, the floods came. Homes were swept away, and lodges that had provided employment for the community were destroyed. As Jane and others in the community began to make sense of what had happened, a pattern emerged. Much of the tree cover along the riverbanks had been cut down over the years, stripping the land of the roots that once held it together and slowed the water down. Rather than accept the situation, Jane and other women began asking a simple question: What could they do differently? The answer became Women in the Wild. The group established a community tree nursery and set out to restore degraded landscapes. But convincing others to join them was not easy.
“There was a common belief that indigenous trees take too long to grow,” Jane recalls. “Even when we offered seedlings to community members, many declined.”
It was around this time that Jane took part in the Face for Change programme, a gender-inclusive water governance initiative implemented by the Mara River Water Users Association (Mara WRUA) with support from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Recognizing that women are often the primary managers of water resources at household and community level, the programme equips women and young people with leadership skills, knowledge of water governance, and the confidence to influence environmental decision-making within their communities.
Women in the Wild indigenous tree planting session happening in villages along the lower Mara River in Emarti Location, Narok County.
The training gave her tools she had not had before: how to organise people around a shared problem, how to communicate a vision clearly, and how to hold steady in the face of resistance. That training became a turning point as Jane went from someone who understood the problem to someone equipped to lead a response to it.
Rather than argue against the narrative, Jane and her members decided to out-plant it. They began putting trees in the ground themselves, starting with their own homesteads. Jane alone planted over 100 trees at her own home. It took a few months, but the trees did what trees do: they grew in the homesteads of the women who had planted them. As the community watched that growth take root, scepticism gave way to interest, and interest to participation. Today, Women in the Wild has planted more than 20,000 trees along the Mara’s riverbanks and in the surrounding community, a restoration effort that started with one woman’s willingness to lead by example, and the leadership training that gave her the confidence to do it.
“As a woman, you can take charge and make a change in your community.”
Several kilometres away in Bomet County, another woman was embarking on a different leadership journey. Long before participating in the Face for Change programme, Margaret Ketili had demonstrated strong leadership through her public service as the Ward Administrator for Bomet County’s Chemaner Ward. For a long time, water scarcity shaped daily life in Chemaner. In 2025, Margaret led efforts that resulted in the construction of a borehole in the ward. The borehole has since become a vital source of water for over 2,000 members of the community, improving water access and reducing the burden on families who once had to travel over 10 kilometres daily in search of water.
Margaret and other women during women leadership in water governance training.
The Face for Change training expanded Margaret’s understanding of how much more she could achieve as a woman leader in water governance. The programme strengthened her confidence to move beyond addressing immediate challenges and to begin identifying opportunities where women could take a leading role in shaping sustainable livelihoods and community resilience. Among the many lessons she gained from the training, one message remained with her above all others.
With this bolstered confidence, Margaret began looking more intentionally at how the existing borehole infrastructure could support women beyond domestic water use. She identified the potential for a women-managed fish pond project linked to the borehole, recognising that the same water source that had improved household access could also become a foundation for income generation and food security. Margaret prepared and submitted a proposal to the county government for the construction of the fish pond, which would be managed by women from Isei WRUA. In June 2026, the women’s group was awarded the project, and construction of the fish pond is now ongoing. For Margaret, the project is a testament to the leadership she has long exercised in her community, now strengthened by the confidence gained through Face for Change. Through the fish pond initiative, women in Isei WRUA are being positioned not only as beneficiaries of water resources but also as leaders and managers of an enterprise that can build greater community resilience.
Margaret (forth from left, in the middle) inspecting the fishpond construction with Taitich Group women leaders.
Although Jane and Margaret’s journeys look different on the surface, they sit at the same point in the water cycle. Trees along a riverbank are not incidental to water governance; they are part of its infrastructure. Root systems bind soil and slow surface runoff, reducing the erosion and flash flooding that displaced Jane’s community in 2020. Forest cover along a catchment supports rainfall retention and groundwater recharge, which in turn sustains the boreholes, springs, and river flows that communities like Chemaner Ward depend on. Restoring the riverbank and securing a community’s water point are, in that sense, two expressions of the same work: safeguarding the Mara River’s ability to keep sustaining the people, wildlife, and livelihoods that rely on it.
That is precisely why the Face for Change programme treats women’s leadership as central to water governance, not peripheral to it. Women are already the primary users and stewards of water at the household and community level; what the programme has done is give that existing stewardship the tools and institutional standing to shape decisions from a tree nursery to a county-level infrastructure proposal. Jane and Margaret are two of eighty women and youth leaders who have come through this training so far. Multiplied across fourteen WRUAs and the wider Mara Basin, that kind of leadership is what will determine whether the river, and the communities along it, remain resilient in the years ahead.
