The Project is run by a 20 member Board of Elders, and managed by a team of local professional staff.
The board is representative of the key stake holders: the Loita Council of Elders, the Loita Women Council, the Loita Youth Associations, the Grassroots Pastoralists Community Development Associations, Local and Central Government, the Diocese of Ngong and external independent experts.
The Diocese of Ngong is the appointed legal holder, but the Loita Maasai have always remained the de facto owners of the ILIDP.
This innovative legal arrangement has enabled he project to realize and exercise their mandate in an all inclusive and harmonious manner.
Cultural Values
Culture could be defined as the accumulated and tested experience as well as the established ways of doing things in a given community.
At this moment the culture of the Loita Maasai pastoralist is still largely intact. He still has a proven source of livelihood and access to his ancestral land.
However, today the Maasai pastoralist is a poor and marginalized minority group. They are faced with a myriad of problems including poverty, loss of land, cultural disintegration, economic exploitation and political oppression. Also they are still victims of western piecemeal development rhetoric and experimentation.
Very often the pastoralist capability and ways of doing things are generally ignored. They are often treated as the participants rather then the main actors of their own development. The result is that the so called development tends to weaken their accumulated knowledge and intends to replace the Maasai way of doing things.
Ritualising Development
In the Maasai culture any new reality has to be ritualised through a series of ceremonies and rites of passage before they can own it. Through such rituals the new reality is made to acquire all the aspects of the Maasai culture. Only by this process the new reality takes a familiar and acceptable form which can be adapted and sustained by he community.
Community Work
“I am, because we are; since we are, therefore I am”
(maasai saying)
Community Spirit
The Loita Community believe in maintaining and sustaining a communal way of life.
It is their believe that the community members should live in harmony, are mutual supportive and inter-dependent in the realisation of general life tasks.
Activities
The 20 000 or so Loita Maasai are subdivided in 5 administrative locations
Pastoralists Community Training
The project runs a pastoralist Training Centre with the necessary facilities. It can cater up to 40 pastoralists a day. The trainings are in the relevant fields and are offered to local farmers and pastoralists.
Health Care
The project has helped to build 4 dispensaries in the 5 administrative sections of Loita. It runs an ambulance service and mobile clinic which operates in the remote parts of Loiota.
The health care program works closely and hand in hand with the traditional healers and herbalists.
Women Programme Activities
One of the Projects objectives is to promote and raise gender awareness and the general welfare of the women of Loita
The project has helped to start and run 7 women groups in all of the Loita locations. These women groups are engaged in various activities including beaded handicrafts, milk processing, hides and skins marketing and subsitance agriculture. Most of the members of these groups enrol in adult literacy classes. The project now employs one full time program officer and as a result the women groups are much more active and efficient
Agriculture, an example of change:”raid the soil rather then cattle”
The life of a Maasai male is a well ordered progression trough a series of life-stages, which are determined by age, initiated through ceremonies and marked by specific duties and privileges.
The Maasai man passes through three main stages: boyhood, warrior and elder.
Warriors, or Morans, are divided in age groups and approximately every fifteen years a new generation of warriors come of age. (and are required to do a scala of things)
The Maasai believe that all the cattle, wherever they are, belong to them. Therefore when they go on cattle raids, they are simply taking back what belongs to them.
However, obviously this practise these days borders at the impossible.
The morans get wounded or even killed in the raids and other communities view the Maasai as enemies.
The Ilkerin-Loita project looked for a solution.
The solution was raiding the soil instead of the cattle.
Morans started growing maize in small gardens around the manyattas (maasai villages).
Over the years this initiative has grown to a full-scale food production. As a result, if the weather condition allows, the Loita Community now grows up to 60% of their grain requirement themselves instead of purchasing it from the shops.
The Ilkerin-Loita Project runs a programme to teach the pastoralists proper land use and management.
