Conservation, elephants, and emotional intelligence

Dr. Winnie Kiiru Transcript

Sabrina Merage Naim
Today, we take you to Kenya to speak with Dr. Winnie Kiiru. The founder of Conservation Kenya and a world renowned wildlife conservationist, Dr. Winnie has been in the field of wildlife and environmental conservation for more than 25 years and her research focuses specifically on human elephant interactions and coexistence solutions.

Kassia Binkowski
Sabrina, I have to admit that we weren't totally sure what role gender was going to play in wildlife conservation. We were kind of curious going into this conversation and we walked away more convinced than ever that creating space at the table for women - and specifically in leadership positions - is going to transform the industry. I don't know about you, but Dr. Winnie definitely convinced me that the future of the planet really does hang in the balance now more than ever.

Sabrina Merage Naim
100%. And this is something we see across every industry and every country. I mean, Dr. Winnie is one of the only black women in Africa to be a leader in the conservation world. And we really think you'll enjoy this conversation. Take a listen.

Dr. Winnie Kiiru, thank you so much for joining us from Kenya. It's such a pleasure to have you with us today.

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be invited to be with you. Thank you.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So today, we're really excited to jump into the conversation about women's activism, in particular in your field of environmental and animal conservation. So Amboseli is an elephant conservation organization in Kenya. And your role is looking to create more coexistence between humans and elephants. Tell us a little bit more about your role there. And we're very curious to understand some more about your work.

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
Thank you. So Amboseli is actually a very small National Park, just to the southwest of Kenya. And the communities around Amboseli are the pastoralist Maasi people. And my role as a conservationist is really to work with the community who have lived for years with wildlife, and to really discuss the changing issues. Remember today that people are having to share a lot more of their space with wildlife. So while traditionally there were just a lot less people, a lot more space. Now we are talking about wildlife existing in what would be called human dominated landscapes. This brings a whole lot of different challenges, and for different groups for women, for children, for men. So our role in Amboseli and especially my organization, Conservation Kenya, is to really have conversations around how can people coexist with wildlife.

Kassia Binkowski
So take us back, Dr. Winnie. Tell us a little bit more about your childhood. Where did you grow up? What did that look like?

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
So I grew up in central Kenya. And I must see that I wanted to be a veterinary doctor when I grew up. And it wasn't because we had a lot of pets or anything. It's because whenever the veterinary doctor came to my grandmother's home, everything stopped. We scrubbed and scrubbed the house, made the best tea and made sure that wherever he was going to sit was beautifully done. So then he would come in and be treated like royalty, and he would go and treat the cows, and then sit and have this cup of tea and my grandmother used to make the most wonderful sweet potatoes. So I thought if really I want to be treated like royalty when I grew up, I need to be a veterinary doctor. But then to become a veterinary doctor was very difficult. In fact, very few girls made them grades for vet school, because most girls schools emphasize arts as opposed to science subjects that would lead you to veterinary medicine. So when I went to high school, it became obvious that I would never make the grades to be a doctor. So I ended up in University studying education. And I basically became a biology teacher. And that may be is what started me off on the path as a wildlife conservationist. I must also say that my father liked to travel the country a lot. So he took us to national parks, and I saw wildlife, but he didn't know wildlife in a way that he could introduce behavior, what they were doing. So actually, it's only later on when I interacted with scientists who had worked with wildlife, especially elephants for a long time, that I started to appreciate the word not just animals standing on stilts, they had behavior, they were unique. There are things that I used to see, but I didn't understand. And so I slowly grew into appreciating wildlife, and studying wildlife. So it wasn't a natural progression. It was really, I was very lucky that when I started biology, and then later, I joined the Kenya Wildlife Service, I found wonderful mentors, good scientists, who introduced me to wildlife in a very unique way, not just the science, but also the behavior and the compassionate side of wildlife.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And you are known as one of the only black women in Africa to really be a leader in wildlife conservation. Most are white men, is that correct?

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
Well, I must say that whenever I go to a gathering of regular Kenyan women, and everybody goes around the table, and they see what they do, and then I say ‘I’m an elephant biologist and I basically study elephants. In many places, I am considered an elephant expert.’ They look at me like ‘What?!’ And often I'm wearing earrings and necklaces with elephants on them. But a lot of people just don't don't even think that that is possible. And especially women. And this is because historically, wildlife has been viewed on the back of tourism. And in Africa, tourists are often men and often quite old. So now how you could even go into the field and then study wildlife and make a living out of it is extremely difficult for the regular Kenyan person to even understand. Now, this is a problem all across Africa. Because for the longest time, wildlife has been viewed as something that is a luxury for the visitors for foreigners. For women, it means spending a lot of time in the outdoors, spending a lot of time in dangerous places, spending a lot of time away from home spending a lot of time with a lot of men. And so it doesn't lend itself to, you know, the stereotype of what a woman should be a mother who stays home with the children, or someone who is a homemaker. Because I can tell you, I have spent a lot of time in the bush. When I was employed, my first job was evaluating the number of elephants that were left in Kenyan forests. I was spending two or three weeks charging through the forest counting elephant dung piles, to try and estimate numbers of elephants by converting the dung files that we saw into a sort of estimate.

Sabrina Merage Naim
That's very glamorous.

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
Not very glamorous work that women want to do. Yes. And it was dangerous as well. Yeah.

Kassia Binkowski
Was there a moment that you can really point to when you started to become aware that women were going to have different opportunities in your community than men do? I mean, I think there's observation that you made about girls education, being more focused on the arts and boys education be focused on science. Were there other moments like that when you became really aware that there was going to be a different a different path available or different opportunities available to you?

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
Oh, yes. I would say as soon as I got into the job market, it was clear to me that I was not playing in a level field. It became very, very clear to me that for me to be considered for the opportunities that would allow me to gro in the field. I had to put myself forward as available, for instance, to spend all the time that was needed in the bush. I remember very well, a woman who was employed at the same time with me. And we were offered an opportunity to go and study to write our master's degree. And I remember her, saying that she couldn't go, because she couldn't leave her children for two years. I, on the other hand, had a two year old child, I spoke to my mother and I spoke to my husband and I said, ‘Look, I really must go, because the course I'm being offered is very important to me.’ But that was the time when I understood that being a woman provides you with a totally different set of choices. I don't remember a single man who was offered that course that turned it down, not one. But I know at least two women who didn't go for no other reason other than the fact that they could not negotiate with people that could then fill in the gaps they had. And that's when it occurred to me that, first of all, if I want to succeed in the field, I must know what my resources are, I must learn to negotiate, I must learn to say that I really want this. And so talk clearly to others who could fill in the slot for me and make it possible. Unfortunately, up to today, the most recent mentorship opportunity that I had at the beginning of this year talking to 30 women from across Africa, this is the issue that kept coming up. They kept asking me, how can you have it all? How can you have children and a career in conservation? How is it possible that you can even pursue an academic degree from first degree all the way to PhD in that, and I say to them, it's because you are socialized to give up. You must relearn that negotiation is something you can do, you will not always win. But if you make it clear, what is important to you, other people will fill in the slots and you are able to go forward. Men negotiate their life all the time. But women tend to fit into the slots that are given to them, and are unable to move forward.

Sabrina Merage Naim
How important was it for you early on, and since then, to have a partner who was supportive, who was able to fill in the slots? What was their support from your family and from your partner? At the time, and has that continued?

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
I think that as I've gone along, I've identified different centers of support. It hasn't been one. There are different ways, yes, in which I have been supported. Sometimes it is family. Other times it is friends. And other times it’s institutions. You get into an institution, and you try and change the status quo. I'll give you an example. When I was in Kenya Wildlife Service, I grew to a fairly senior level. And during that time, if you wanted to go on a field trip, you couldn't really negotiate whether to leave on Sunday. Men always wanted to leave on Sunday. But for me, that didn't work, I needed to leave on Tuesday, because on Monday, I would go take my son to school and explain that I’m not going to be around the whole week. And to negotiate that and make it part of the plan that field trips always started on Tuesday. And I tell you, the practices are literally still going on in the organization. Some people don't even remember that I am the one who negotiated it. Simple things that make women's life's work are often neglected in the workplace. Now, today, I am dealing with many young people. There are certain biological things that we women suffer. And now I will not call it suffering. We are creatures that, for instance, must worry about our reproductive health. Our sanitation is totally different. Our needs are very, very different. And therefore it's very important that organizations think about women. Women will get pregnant. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with needing to have a baby because, you know, nobody else is gonna have babies, right? Okay, for the next nine months, this is what's gonna happen, and I'm not going to be unwell. I'm just going to be pregnant. Right?

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right. And it's beautiful. It's not a curse, it's something that we should celebrate.

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
Yes it's not a curse. It's something beautiful, and it doesn't make me unwell. And it doesn't make me an invalid, either, I can be a high performer who is pregnant. So it's very important for women to recognize the things that make our lives not work. Some of them are cultural in Africa, we have a lot of cultural issues. But if you put them on the table, and you discuss them, if you don't fight, you just explain, you know, this is me, this is unique. This is important. I think for a lot of my girls, I call them my girls, those who come into my space. And I try to mentor them. I'm always saying, if you learn nothing else from me, remember, everything is negotiable.

Kassia Binkowski
Where did you learn this from? I mean, where did you pick up that mentality and that confidence?

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
I was brought up by a group of very, very, very strong women. My grandmother was very well known in her community for being strong, and fairly different. Like I said, she was very tidy, very neat, very organized, very successful in her farming ventures, which required her to be quite pushy. And so I learned very early, that it's important to put your point across my mother, my grandmother had eight daughters. In Africa, it's very important to have sons. So she only got sons at the tail end. So she had two sons and eight daughters. So for their daughters to survive and thrive, she had to be quite tough. Because literally, everybody was telling her husband, you know, ‘Marry someone else, because you need sons.’ And so my aunties all had to be strong negotiators. And somehow my grandfather learned the hard way to support the girls. And so I was very lucky. Then my father also, it was very clear to him that there was nothing, no difference between me and my brother, or my sister and I and my brother. He gave us the same tasks, he made it very clear that the world is not a table, you cannot fall off at the edge, you have to keep moving. You have to keep moving. And so I'm very lucky in that way that I learned to negotiate from my family. But let me also say that I've learned a lot from other older women, because the tools I got from my family, they weren't enough.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So I'm curious to understand, I mean, you're saying something that I think women around the world are facing, which is that in their workplace, they're not supported. They're not nurtured for being women, for experiencing what women experience what we need. We very much are expected to fit into them, you know, a men's work world. And this is something that in almost every industry and in every country around the world. And I'm curious as to when you were beginning your career as an elephant biologist, and, and a wildlife conservationist. Were there men who were looking at you saying, ‘What is she doing?’ What were the barriers for you to be able to grow into someone who is world renowned and respected? What did you have to push through to get to where you are today?

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
One of the very important barriers was labels. You know, if you are in a world that's full of men, and you come up strongly for or against an issue, I'll give you an example. In 1992/93, Kenya had about 15,000 elephants left after a serious poaching problem that had gone on for about two decades. Kenya's population reduced from an estimated 167,000 elephants to about 15 to 16,000. Now, at the same time, because the human population had increased significantly there was serious human wildlife conflict. My immediate supervisor at the time was a woman as well. And we sat together and we said, if this is such a serious human wildlife conflict, we must insist and push that the solution to conflict is not killing elephants. Because what would happen is, if there was a situation where an elephant killed someone, or was involved in a fairly negative human wildlife conflict situation, then the solution would be something called ‘problem animal control,’ where you actually go and shoot the animal. And oftentimes the animal that was shot was not the one that perpetrated whatever problem. So we made sure and we formed a unit that would ensure that they were there very quickly to make sure that elephants were not killed. We were not very popular about that. We were called bunny huggers, they said we loved elephants more than people. We were 'unrealistic,' we were 'emotional,' we were 'anthropomorphic,' we extended our emotions on animals. We were working within what we call the Amboseli elephant project, which is the oldest elephant research project that followed elephants and note them literally, in terms of their lineage. People said, all these women, they are bunny huggers, they don't want to deal with the problem. So immediately, you attract labels that you are supposed to make your own. While in actual fact, your argument is sound, and it actually saves whatever it is you care about. So one of the things that women must appreciate is that it doesn't matter what label you're given, you must always have partners around you. And it could be men or women, to check with them. Whether really, you're being irrational, or whether whatever it is you're trying to argue for has a basis, whether it's logical, whether it's political, whatever it is, check the facts and refuse to sit with a label that is given to you.

Sabrina Merage Naim
These are ways of just diminishing women in their work, right? Calling us emotional and dismissing us in that way.

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
Exactly. And that is okay. As long as I don't own the label. The person has a right to say whatever they like. But when I go to my quiet place, I must remember that I must not own that label.

Kassia Binkowski
So I'm curious, this idea of partnership and of finding your allies and identifying those people who who have your back. I mean, the story that you're telling now is not dissimilar from stories that we've heard from other women, other guests on the show about finding a partner to help shatter glass ceilings with or alongside. What did the gender diversity look like in the industry at large? I mean, how lucky was it that you found another woman who was thinking the same way that you were thinking? Or was that really kind of an anomaly at the time?

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
I'll tell you, this is related to me all the time - the loneliness, especially at the top. The higher you go in any field, you'll find that it's lonely in wildlife conservation. We have looked at wildlife organizations around East Africa and we haven't found a single one that has more than 2% women at the executive level. So indeed, the loneliness at the top is real. Now, very recently, a group of women, we formed an organization called Women in Environmental Leadership. And what we have decided, is that we are going to fundraise and develop a program for women who are in executive positions in wildlife and environment, take them through a one year program that involves coaching, mentorship, soft skills, everything that they didn't tell you in school. But that is so important. And in that way, because we'll be dealing with a cohort of 20 women at a time from all over Africa, we hope to build networks of women that can now support one another.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So you're talking about women in conservation, you're talking about creating a network of women a pathway for more women at the top. And I'm curious as to what is your argument as to why it matters? Why does it matter that more women are engaged in the future of the natural world? Why does it matter that there are more women at the executive level, and other than just saying, you know, equality and numbers, what are you seeing actually on the ground and in the work that women provide at is different, and that matters.

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
Groups that have women in them are more collaborative, they are more inclusive. And they tend to be more compassionate, less competitive. And therefore, because the environment is one of those areas where unless everybody is included, unless everybody is informed, and everybody's voice is heard, the issues around environment are so important…when we leave people behind the environment, whether you're talking about wildlife management, whether you're talking about forestry, whether you're talking about recycling, women's voices, must be heard as much as the voices of young people, old people. Women tend to see the whole picture. And therefore they tend to collaborate better, they tend to be more efficient. And so they listen to the voices of those who are least heard. They are the ones who are most likely to look around. So excluding women, makes teams too competitive. The problem is women are made to feel like they got here as a favor. I have spent 25, maybe 30 years, in the same space of wildlife conservation, I know things and have invested heavily in not just practical conservation. I have traveled the world. I have read books, I have academic qualifications. And so I think it's very hard for anybody to do me a favor. In fact, excluding me, is their loss.

Kassia Binkowski
You have obviously worked so incredibly hard to get where you are in the industry, and the industry owes you a debt of gratitude for the work that you have done in wildlife conservation. What needs to happen to remove more barriers for the next generation coming up in this of women coming up in this space? What needs to happen to continue to diversify the industry to create more room at the top and these leadership positions you? You are clearly working very hard to do that through your women environment initiative. What are some of the things you can point to to bring down those barriers?

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
When I tell the girls i mentor what I do, they're like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we didn't even know that you could do that.’ Okay? So encouraging girls to stay with science education, and making sure that there is enough investment both in terms of equipment, and well trained teachers. Now, as soon as they finish high school, and then they choose environmental education, conservation, and both fields go into university. There is also a point at which we lose them. It is important to rethink the entry points for young people. Environmental education, and many conservation organizations are guilty for not valuing new talent and expect people to work for nothing. And this affects women more than men. It is very important to find a person who has spent time studying environmental education, and stop this thing of expecting people to be volunteers forever. Once they get into the job market, it's important to understand that we are in the job market, but we are human. Women will need time to go and get babies. If you send someone to a remote fields station somewhere, make it possible for them to live there with the child. They don’t nee much, just food and a comfortable house. Don’t take a woman to go and work in a tent that has holes, and be happy that she's going to be able to live there with her child. We have the instinct of nurturing our children. So let's make it easy for them to do their footwork so that they can go in the field. When they grow to executive leadership, talk in the same niche to stop this tokenism of just saying Oh, oh, my goodness, we forgot to do the gender balancing. Now we need one woman in the boat. You know, studies have shown that the more isolated you are in an environment, if you put two women in the boardroom, they strengthen each other, if you put three they become even stronger, if you put for they become really strong. So it's not just a question of putting token women in position. It’s a question of understanding that it's a whole ecosystem that needs to be empowering, that needs to give women the space to excel. My answer to your question is that let's value women. Let's give them their space, let's stop being tokenising them. Let's give them on merit what they deserve. Let's stop putting them down. Let's stop labeling them. And using their God given all the endowments, that emotional way in which they project themselves, don't label them and make it wrong.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I see this is really important feedback and advice for the institutions and the organizations that will hopefully open their doors to more women in the future. What would you say to the young girls and to the young women who are hoping to follow in your footsteps but are seeing so many obstacles around them? What would you say to them to encourage?

Dr. Winnie Kiiru
I would tell them that the future belongs to them. And nobody really gives you what you want. You kind of negotiate, fight a bit, negotiate, fight a little bit. Get out of your comfort zone. Find sisters, and brothers, because I must tell you some of the people that have really helped me to figure out how to think and negotiate my way out of challenges are men that are good supporters of women and allies and fair. And so I firmly believe that this is our time. Indeed, this is our time as women, but it's not just going to come easy. It is our time because it is that time when for environment for example, collaboration, inclusiveness, compassion, and the only ones that are going to get us out of this quagmire that climate change has cost the whole world. I mean, we are in trouble. You know, the whole world is in trouble. If another virus comes on the back of this Coronavirus. I mean we are finished. And so this is a time like no other. This is a time when women's leadership is needed. My advice to women is it's our time. This is a time like no other. Nobody else can change this world. Our survival is dependent on women standing up and saying we are here. We are ready to collaborate. We are ready to be counted. We are ready to offer that resource which belongs to no one else. It is only women that can think through such a complex problem as we have now and I dare say that this is just the beginning. Because we have damaged our world and our world we are going to pay for every single thing we have done. We need women now more than ever.