Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Standing in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Photo by Michel Renaudeau) Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images The Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) is world famous for the Ngorongoro Crater, an enormous unfilled caldera (a crater created by the eruption and collapse of a volcano). This part of East Africa’s Serengeti region is also renowned for wildlife, from rhinos to lions. These attractions have made Ngorongoro a popular international tourism destination.
Unfortunately Ngorongoro has also become a global example of something much less positive: an aggressive approach to conservation, sometimes called “fortress conservation,” that pushes out the Indigenous people who have been living alongside wildlife for centuries. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The NCA was established in 1959, under the British colonial government then ruling Tanzania.
Under a multiple land-use model, the NCA has three mandates: tourism, conservation, and safeguarding and promotion of the interests of the Maasai people. “Because of those three mandates, there has been a lot of tension since the creation of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area,” says Fredrick Ole Ikayo, a law researcher at the University of Arizona, whose paternal family lives in the NCA. This calls for some tough choices.
“There is no clear single causative agent or solution to improve conditions simultaneously for people, wildlife and tourism,” according to a 2021 paper publi.