4.11 Indigenous Land Defense

Daniel Kobei is the Founder and Executive Director of the Ogiek Peoples' Development Program,  a Kenyan NGO working to secure human and land rights for the Indigenous Ogiek community as well as other Indigenous peoples across Kenya and Africa. Daniel represents Indigenous peoples under the umbrella of the International Indigenous Forum for Biodiversity and the Collaborative Partnership for Wildlife Management, set by the Convention of Biological Diversity. Daniel has been promoting the restoration of the Mau Forest Complex through Ogiek community involvement as a forest dwelling, hunter gathering community. Daniel helped lead the Ogiek to winning an eight year legal battle over land and human rights abuses at the African Court on Human and People's Rights in 2017. But four years later, the Ogiek community are still waiting for the implementation of that legal judgment. 

We speak about:

• the violation of the rights of the Ogiek community by the Kenyan state
• resisting forced evictions & dispossession of ancestral lands
• wining an 8 year long court case at the African Court on Human and People's Rights 
• the support of regional and international Indigenous rights groups 
• the undermining of Indigenous conservation knowledge 
• the impact of climate change in the Mau Forest complex - and much more!

Daniel joins us from Nairobi, Kenya.