Maasai Education, Research and Conservation Institute (MERC)

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Maasai Education, Research and Conservation Institute (MERC) is a grassroots network of Maasai organizations advocating for the protection of traditional land rights of the Maasai people, and for conservation, management, and sustainable use of the great ecosystems of East Africa.
MERC was founded in 1987 by Meitamei Olol Dapash to bolster efforts of the Maasai community to protect wildlife and promote Maasai land rights and cultural survival. MERC is a registered Non-governmental organization in Kenya, located at the MERC Dopoi Center, Talek, Narok County, Kenya, and also a 501(c)3 in the U.S.

Our Mission
MERC promotes the empowerment of the indigenous Maasai community of East Africa through education, tourism reform, environmental conservation, and land rights, while it engages with broader international efforts for indigenous cultural survival, education, species survival, and environmental conservation.

Our Vision
Our vision is a Maasai community that occupies its homeland within African states yet as a distinct society, one economically secure and politically empowered to determine its own future.

What we do?
• Land Justice and Stewardship: The Maasai Community is organizing across Maasailand to reclaim lands originally stolen under British colonization and reoccupied under the state of Kenya.
• Ecology and Coexistence: MERC has participated in conservation for over thirty years through many partnerships, always understood through the premise that conservation of Maasai lands will only work as long as the Maasai people are involved and benefiting.
• Decolonizing Knowledge: What is written about Maasailand has typically not included the input of Maasa people themselves. MERC supports Maasai scholarship and collaboration on knowledge production.
• Leadership: Maasai must reclaim our rights to our own leadership that is selected through our own cultural processes
• Resilient Futures: Maasai people must be the architects of development in Maasailand, which is being built through our accountability to all beings that share the land and to our global human community
• Maasai Led Tourism: The wildlife tourism industry that exists on Maasailand has great potential to enable our survival as a community and culture.

Mary Poole is the co-director of Maasai Education, Research and Conservation Institute (MERC).

For other net participants we can offer an expert guidance through trained staff, give an expert opinion, procure expert information and establish new contacts in the field of our work.