The need for competency in tour guide work in Narok County conservancies and Maasai Mara National Park led to the launch of a competency based curriculum in a community school for those handling tourists nearly two decades before the CBC become a reality.
Investors in tourism had learned that despite the huge potential for employment for local school leavers in the commercially viable tourism industry, lack of skills curtailed their hiring forcing them to view wildlife conservation and tourism negatively.
The Koiyaki Guiding School was founded in 2005 by investors in tourism and community leaders after it emerged that few people from the Maasai communities were getting employment in the profitable game lodges, tour firms and wildlife conservancies.
Since its formation, it has seen hundreds of local young men and women graduate with skills to serve in the various departments of the tourism sector in the national park and conservancies creating cohesion between the community, conservancies, investors in tourism and the Kenya Wildlife Service.
Students at the school are familiarised with various skills to know the wildlife, their behaviours, choice of food and areas of what brings conflicts between them and the people and how to mitigate against such without harming the animals, indicates a report by one of the founders and teachers at the Koiyaki Guiding School Michael Kahika.
Despite starting with a basic tour guiding course where the students gained skills on how to take tourists through the game park while explaining to them about the wild animals available and how they adopted to the environment, today Kahika says that a curriculum has been expanded to ecosystems away from Maasai Maara.
The founder members says that graduates of the Koiyaki Guiding School today enjoyed a curriculum which covered a wide range of areas including marine related issues marine parks in the Indian Ocean.
Graduates from the guiding school who interact with first time tourists visiting the Maasai Mara block of ecosystem, Kahika says are today able to influence the visitors to get interacted into sampling other destination after passing key information to them.
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Students, the teacher says have also been gaining entrepreneurial skills to expand marketing of Kenya’s tourist destination in a package without merely favouring their region and that ensures wider sources of income are captured.
The success of hands on teaching and adoption of market oriented curriculum had been commended by leading curriculum developers at the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development and in the private sector.
Due to the acquisition of requisite knowledge on the importance of wildlife and livestock conservation, graduates of the guiding school have seen reduction on the human-wildlife conflict in the past blamed for annihilation of wildlife and high animosity between conservationists and local communities and killing of wild animals.
Communities today appreciate the commercial role played by better conservation of wildlife and use of skills from the guiding school to advance conservation and promote expanded marketing of the region as a tourist destination of international repute.
The success of Koiyaki Guiding School comes at a time when the government has already started a programme to recognition of prior learning and provision of appropriate certification.
Founders of the school have already launched campaigns to work with local curriculum experts with the aim to ensure that certificates held by graduates from the school are recognised by the qualification authorities so that they are able to serve local and internationally labour opportunities and openings.
Education experts have also been campaigning for learners pursuing technical skills to go digital but above all adopt innovative methods to penetrate the work places and markets where they skills are required.
By Robert Nyagah
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