KENWEB members

Associate Members

Field and Capacity building benefits to NMK:KENWEB has, through the intervention of Zoology Head, responding to a request we made through DRC we received a space for storage for equipment and for maintaining equipment for wetland analyses. So far we have used this equipment to facilitate wetlands studies in which NMK has been involved with no charge to the institution including: the Wetlands Atlas project (Ministry for the environment); collections of fish specimens for the NMK aquarium among others. This office space has been considered for expansion to a Wetlands Resource Centre that we hope NMK would agree to host. However, other partner institutions are also eligible to take on this arrangement. Since 2009, KENWEB has contributed to collections of fauna and flora from Tana River Delta, Umani Springs, LaikipiaCounty and the Loboi Swamp, which have been curated at NMK.

KENWEB is, through its training component, and using funds from various donors currently paying fees for two NMK staff for capacity building including MwadimeNyange (undergraduate student in the herbarium) and Joseph Gathua (Master’s student Ichthyology section). Other students supported are from KWS, UoNbi, LWF and IRD.

KENWEB advisory role: KENWEB members, due to their activities in the field and information provision of  wetlands, have been invited to committees locally and internationally including – Ramsar technical committee (by KWS), the Prime Minister’s Deltas task force (by the OPM), the Tana Delta Management Plan technical committee (by NEMA),the Wetlands Policy task force (by KWS and NEMA), the Tana Delta Ramsar site launch committee (by KWS). This position in the committee is for KENWEB and implies that the scientist of the consortium with the most experience in various areas attends these meetings.The history of KENWEB with TNC dates back to 2011 when we presented a joint project to the US National Science Foundation. Since then we have been invited to join the Tana Basin Partners, which was founded, by TNC, WRMA and UNEP.

KENWEB partners have anMoU with WRMA for the use of an ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler; River Ray serial number 61564) for use on research on the Tana River. This equipment purchased by KU Leuven (Belgium) is the subject of a joint cooperation on water resource monitoring and conservation.

Internationally we are also involved in the IPBES (as part of the IUCN major groups) and we are members of the steering committee of the International Partnership of the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI) that was set up under the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD).