Name: Why I Want to Bring Lions Back to My Village | Seif Hamisi | TED
Uploaded: 2026-03-23T21:39:36.000Z
Duration: 9 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Picture this: you are 5 or 6 years old, getting ready to go to bed,

Adverbs of manner

and then suddenly you hear these lion roars.

This is how it was in the early '70s in my village in Taveta, in Kenya, on the southeastern slope of Mount Kilimanjaro.

but looking back, I see it as something powerful, a beautiful reminder of how close we lived with nature.

Sadly, the nighttime roars and the many animals that once roamed our village are gone.

What happened in my village has happened across Africa.

Our forests, savannas, grasslands, and wetlands are disappearing very fast,

and the hardest-hit places are community lands where people and wildlife lived side by side.

In five decades, five decades, much of the land outside protected areas has been converted into either farms or settlements.

It's not surprising that the population of wildlife in Africa has declined by three-quarters in the same period.

This is not just a sad statistic, but it's a crisis.

All of us know that we've spent billions on conservation in Africa, yet wildlife keeps on declining,

and people are going deeper into poverty and becoming even more vulnerable to climate change.

Because we've been applying ecological solutions to fix what are inherently economic problems.

The truth is that conservation works only if it creates income to people living closest to nature.

That means we have to make nature not just something to protect, but something to invest in.

That's why we have to grow capitalist solutions in conservation, not the exploitative type, but

models where nature drives business, where healthy ecosystems bring real income to families, where nature conservation and economic growth go hand in hand.

This is beginning to happen across Africa, from the shrublands of Namakwa Land in South Africa to the winding tributaries of Okavango River in Botswana, the grasslands, savanna woodlands in Kenya, Namibia, Mozambique, Madagascar, and

Zimbabwe, to the forests of Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Congo.

We are building better natural resource management systems and incentivizing efforts to bring back wildlife populations.

In many parts of South Africa, herding livestock isn't just a job; it's a way of life.

But many rural farmers there are struggling to get their cattle to the market.

Even though they own half of the livestock in the country, only 5%—5%—of meat comes from them,

and the grass continues to suffer as cattle graze on the same land all year round.

And when their cattle get to the market, if they do, they are often malnourished and can't fetch a fair price.

Mpolokenge Ngubo, a great livestock farmer and herder from Eastern Cape, South Africa.

With support from Conservation International, she and other farmers have turned back to traditional grazing, where livestock moves between pasture and allowing land to rest and recover.

Healthy grasslands mean healthy livestock to them.

And the change here is that those farmers have agreed to protect the land as they access a cattle market that comes directly to them.

Mpolokenge's cow, in a recent auction, the cattle fetched the highest bid in the market.

And this is how it works: because the model is not top-down, it's built on what communities already know and practice.

and with that, the fields are now humming with insects and chattering birds.

Wildlife is getting restored one grazing cycle at a time, and with cash streaming to farmers' pockets.

Now, in Kenya, business solutions are taking off, too.

In Tulu Hills, farmers have transitioned from slash-and-burn to one of the earliest forest carbon projects.

Here, they are conserving and protecting one million acres of wilderness.

And around Masai Mara—all of you perhaps have heard about Masai Mara—communities living around there have come up together, pulled their land voluntarily,

and formed these big wildlife conservancies that they own.

They lease these lands to safari operators and ecologists and get incomes while maintaining their land rights and way of life.

During the COVID pandemic, tourism crashed.

These conservancies took up loans and paid the leases.

When the pandemic eased and tourism came back, they repaid those loans quickly, showing that capitalist solutions are actually maturing.

This intervention has brought 180,000 hectares under community protection, doubling the space for wildlife in that area.

And the impact on the families who are in this arrangement is transformational.

On average, households earn around $230 per month, a little bit less than the starting salary of a university graduate in Kenya.

But in a place where jobs are scarce and the future is uncertain, nature is not only surviving,

It is bringing dignity, security, and choice.

These are the kinds of 21st-century conservation approaches that we must accelerate.

We must bring tomorrow's conservation business solutions today, because this is the right vision for Africa.

It's the vision that our changing climate demands.

It is a vision, ultimately, that ultimately people benefit, not because they gave up their culture,

Now, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to say this provoking, perhaps unannoying statement.

People talk about money as if it's the root of all evil.

But in conservation of nature, it's clearly the lack of it.

That's the true root of evil that's driving the forces of degradation and destruction that we see today in those landscapes.

We have to work with dedication, speed, and scale.

But the tide is on our side, because today, communities are stronger, their voice is louder in decision-making,

and there are stronger rights and safeguards.

Finance and market connectivity today, supported by an expanding technological space, has made it easier today, more than before, to invest, to innovate,

and build businesses with and for communities that are living closest to nature.

And policies and incentives by governments are taking a different level.

For example, the wildlife profit-enhancing policies of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and

Namibia to the Kenya carbon and conservancy policies—more revenue is now streaming to families and communities that are closest to nature.

It doesn't matter which ecosystem you are talking about, because it's only through economic prosperity of people living alongside nature that nature, wildlife, and

Maybe then the wildlife will be restored around my village,

and maybe then—maybe—my grandchildren will get to hear the lions roar back again.