How dung paper is helping elephant conservation in Kenya

Gitonga Njeru, bird story agency

Mwaluganje Elephant Sanctuary chairperson Salim Mwanyongwe is a happy man. The reserve he helps run is increasingly being recognised as a conservation success story. And so is one of the ecotourism experiment’s most important economic activities: the production of elephant dung paper.

“The processed product is sold in Nairobi and exported to neighbouring Tanzania. The facility is community owned, and the entire income generated goes to the community. Most of the country’s paper made from dung comes from here,” Mwanyongwe said of the product, which is produced from elephant dung recovered from the area’s roads.

Mwaluganje Elephant Sanctuary was established in 1993 from leased land owned by about 4 000 farmers and landowners, and today it is a community-owned 36-square-kilometre conservation area for elephants.

Located approximately 45 kilometres southwest of Mombasa, the region contains a substantial elephant population, and the sanctuary is part of a key elephant corridor in the eastern part of the country.

“This area contains slightly more than 50 percent of the country’s elephant population. This encompasses Shimba Hills Reserve and the expansive Tsavo Tsavo Parks, which are the physical size of Belgium,” Manyongwe said.

“Incidents of illegal logging in protected areas around the coastal areas have been reduced as many farmers and landowners have been granted licences by the government to collect the dung. This has led to farmers having a source of income that does not harm the environment.”

Coastal Kenya, like parts of Tanzania, Mozambique and Somalia, once had an enormous coastal forest that stretched all along what is today regarded as the Swahili Coast – an area that sees regular, moisture-laden trade winds dumping rain on forested coastal escarpments.

Deforestation throughout the region has increased the regularity of droughts and exacerbated floods. Mwanyongwe, through initiatives like the Mwaluganje elephant dung project, is hoping to reverse this trend.

“It is an industry that has not been fully tapped. There is little competition. Paper made from elephant dung is set to grow within the next few years,” said Benjamin Ndubi, a 30-year-old Nairobi-based entrepreneur who owns a facility in Mombasa that is specially designed to process elephant dung into paper.

Ndubi buys the dung directly from farmers and turns it into paper, and then processes and sells it.

Wildlife authorities only allow the practice in small quantities to minimise negative environmental effects. This is because elephant dung plays a vital role in the ecosystem, according to Bernard Agwanda, a mammalogist at the National Museums of Kenya.

“Elephant dung is vital for beetles and other insects to survive. If you use it wrongly, you will starve and destabilise the ecosystem. Elephants consume plants, and so the energy has to flow back into the soil,” Agwanda said.

“So you have to use the dung wisely in small quantities, and that will allow enough time to go back into the soil. It is much better than telling farmers to clear their land and plant non-indigenous trees to produce paper. But these two issues differ scientifically and economically,” Agwanda explained.

Dung is widely used as a fuel in Kenya, with farmers collecting it all and burning it, releasing sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere. Keeping the carbon locked in in the paper, is a better option, according to Ndubi, as farmers are encouraged to return a part of it to the soil.

Ndubi now worries about competition from wood cut from natural forests after Kenya recently reversed a ban on logging in the country.

“Paper from elephant dung is of very high quality. There is no physical difference between paper made from timber, bamboo and that derived from elephant dung. But with the recent declaration of the government lifting the ban on logging – it may reverse the gains made on conserving the environment.

“It also may affect my business, one way or the other. But on a positive note, forest cover in the country has increased, as many of us turn to innovative climate adaptation solutions,” he said.