Over the past decade, Kenya Forest Service guards have repeatedly evicted people living in the Embobut Forest in the Cherangany Hills. On 25 February 2015, guards torched more than 30 houses belonging to the Sengwer indigenous people and destroyed school books, clothes and cooking utensils.

Today, a three-day-long meeting is planned to start, hosted by the World Bank and the Kenyan Government, aimed at discussing positive ways forward. The Sengwer, then, are supposed to sit down to talk with the government whose agencies burned their houses last week.

On 27 February 2015, the Sengwer wrote to the World Bank and the Government of Kenya asking them to stop the evictions or cancel the meeting. The Sengwer called for an urgent meeting with the meeting organisers to ensure that the harassment stops permanently before the talks begin.

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The World Bank is hosted a Colloquium on “Deepening Dialogue with Stakeholders in the Forest Sector in Kenya”, at the week of 6 March, 2015.

The Colloquium was organised following a series of violent evictions over many years of the indigenous Sengwer from their homes in the Embobut Forest in the Cherangany Hills.

Days before the Colloquium started, guards from the Kenya Forest Service torched 30 houses belonging to the Sengwer. Hardly a promising setting for the Colloquium.

On its website, the World Bank describes the Colloquium as “historic”. The Bank reports that,

The opening day was marked by frank and promising exchanges between nearly 300 leaders of the Sengwer, Ogiek, Yiaku, Aweer, Kaya, Masai, Samburu, Illchamus and Endorois communities and representatives of the national and county governments.

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By Dean Puckett - First published on redd-monitor

When Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, visited Kenya earlier this month, he reportedly urged the Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta to sort out Kenya’s historical land injustices once and for all, specifically mentioning the plight of the “Sengwer of Cherangani Hills.” But despite the World Bank having ‘a word’ with its ‘client’, the plight of the Sengwer of Embobut forest has worsened dramatically. An indigenous community is being evicted from their ancestral land in the name of conservation.

I am currently filming a documentary about the Sengwer. As I write this I am sitting in a small town on the edge of Embobut forest. On Sunday 23rd November, I was heading up into Embobut from a settlement called Tangul which sits on the edge of the contested forest area.

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NOTE BY THE NRAN: The No REDD in Africa Network reminds the world that the World Bank project in the Cherangany Hills included REDD and that the forced relocation of the Sengwer People is indicative of the grave human rights violations, including threats to the cultural survival of Indigenous Peoples, that REDD projects can cause.

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A leaked copy of a World Bank investigation seen by the Guardian has accused the bank of failing to protect the rights of one of Kenya’s last groups of forest people, who are being evictedfrom their ancestral lands in the name of climate change and conservation.

Thousands of homes belonging to hunter-gatherer Sengwer people living in the Embobut forest in the Cherangani hills were burned down earlier this year by Kenya forest service guards who had been ordered to clear the forest as part of a carbon offset project that aimed to reduce emissions from deforestation.

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