LAKE VICTORIA BASIN

Mara River winding across the Serengeti Savanna, Tanzania

TheMara River Basin, Kenya andTanzania Extraction of irrigation water along the Mara River poses a major threat to the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. The Mara River Basin extends over 13,750 km², of which 70 per cent lies within Narok County in Kenya, and 30 per cent within the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania (Lake Victoria Basin Commission 2007). The Mara River originates on the Mau escarpment in Kenya and has two major tributaries, the Nyangores and Amala River, which carry the headwaters to the more arid lands downstream and support pastoralists and a large population of wildlife. The rivers converge at the base of the escarpment to form the upper Mara River,

which flows along a gentle gradient through wooded grasslands used primarily for livestock grazing but also increasingly for small-scale and irrigated agriculture (Lake Victoria Basin Commission 2007). Human activities within the Mara River Basin are negatively impacting the world’s greatest annual wildlife migration across the East African plains. The annual migration of almost two million wildebeest and other wildlife across Tanzania’s legendary Serengeti National Park and Kenya’s renowned Maasai Mara National Reserve is a key tourist attraction, generating large annual incomes UNEP 2009).

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