“Wildlife Works is responsible for serious human rights abuses at the Kasigau project”

New report by SOMO and the Kenya Human Rights Commission reveals “widespread sexual harassment and abuse”

PHOTO Credit: “Offsetting human rights: Sexual abuse and harassment at the Kasigau Corridor REDD+ Project in Kenya”

Criticisms of REDD have escalated recently, with critiques from Bloomberg, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Die Zeit, Follow the Money, and The New Yorker.

Much of the criticism focusses on fake baselines and fake carbon offsets.

Today, a new report is released that exposes sexual abuse and harassment at the Kasigau Corridor REDD project in Kenya. The report, by SOMO (the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations based in the Netherlands) and the Kenya Human Rights Commission, is titled “Offsetting human rights: Sexual abuse and harassment at the Kasigau REDD+ Project in Kenya”.

The report is the first in a series by SOMO looking into the human rights impacts of forest-based carbon offsetting.

The Kasigau project is run by the US company Wildlife Works. There are actually two projects: The Kasigau Corridor REDD Project – Phase I Rukinga Sanctuary; and The Kasigau Corridor REDD Project - Phase II The Community Ranches.

This post is the first of a series over the next few days about the Kasigau REDD projects. Future posts will look at the responses to the report, the role of the auditors in giving the project a green light, and the company Wildlife Works. This post focusses on the reports of systemic sexual harassment and abuse by senior management at Wildlife Works.

A “successful” project?

A promotional video for the project by the marketing company Everland (which was launched by Wildlife Works in 2017) describes the project as “community driven” and “successful”. In the video, George Maina Thumbi, Agribusiness and Forestry Manager at Wildlife Works, explains that,

“Some of the community were desperate, they were jobless and now from the projects that we have initiated they have a daily job, they get money and food from those projects.”

Many corporations have bought carbon offsets from the Kasigau REDD projects, including Barclays, BNP Paribas, Audi, Netflix, McKinsey, Microsoft, Shell, the International Finance Corporation, the European Investment Bank, Coca-Cola, Deliveroo, and Kering, the owner of fashion companies Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.

“Serious human rights abuses”

Despite the marketing claims of “high quality credits” from Kasigau, SOMO and the Kenya Human Rights Commission’s report reveals that,

Wildlife Works is responsible for serious human rights abuses at the Kasigau project. Researchers working with SOMO interviewed 44 people who were current or former employees or members of the local community. This report is based on the testimonies we received from 31 individuals about gender-based abuses. These interviews reveal widespread sexual harassment and abuse by senior male members of Wildlife Works staff and rangers. . . . Wildlife Works has allowed or enabled a culture of serious abuse to persist at Kasigau and sold its products as ethical when they are anything but.

The local and international female research team carried out initial interviews in July 2023 in the Kiswahili language. In August 2023, a review was carried out and in August 2023, the researchers carried out a second round of interviews.

Many of the people interviewed for the report became emotional during the interviews. Several of the Wildlife Works employees expressed their concern that they they could face retaliation for speaking negatively about Wildlife Works. All the people interviewed for the report are anonymous.

The incidents in SOMO and the Kenya Human Rights Commission’s report took place between 2011 and 2023.

“Male perpetrators’ abuse of power is systemic”

The report found that,

male perpetrators’ abuse of power is systemic and has been going on for years, and that senior managers of Wildlife Works at Kasigau are aware of these issues. In fact, the company culture of sexual extortion, assault, and humiliation of women persists because management accepts and enables it.

The sexual abuses that employees and local communities report at the Kasigau project “include physical assault and attempted rape on company premises or land as well as persistent harassment and the use of humiliating sexualised slurs”.

One employee told the research team that, “Women are treated as sex objects but nothing happens because [the perpetrators] intimidate everybody.”

The report found that alleged perpetrators often seek out moments in the workplace when no one else is around. For example, one day while alone with a female employee in a field office, a senior manager said to her, “I will do anything you want if you just sleep with me.”

The report makes for shocking reading with several allegations similar to this one:

One woman worker recalled how, less than two years ago, a senior manager suddenly locked the door to the workspace they were in and began touching and groping her. “I was really scared,” she told SOMO, “and told him to stop.” Angered at her protest, he reminded her “that I would lose my job if I did not agree to what he was telling me”.

SOMO and the Kenya Human Rights Commission also report that some senior male staff target female recruits by demanding sex in exchange for jobs.

The male employees who spoke to the researchers said that women “are routinely taken advantage of”, are “sexually harassed”, and “have to sleep with their bosses before getting that job”.

One senior staff member frequently pursues sexual relations with the wives of younger male colleagues. The senior staff member sends the colleagues far from home for long periods of time, then extorts sex from their wives.

The report states that,

These women, one respondent explained, may be told that “I’m the one who gives your husband work” and that “this job might end” if they refuse to sleep with him. Afraid and intimidated that their husbands might lose their jobs, “some sleep with [the alleged perpetrator] to secure their jobs”, one ranger said. The husbands of these women are, according to the rangers we spoke to, often rewarded with promotion, or penalised with demotion, based on whether their wives succumb to the pressure. As one ranger phrased this extortionary practice, “[Y]ou pay for your promotion with your wife.”

SOMO and the Kenya Human Rights Commission conclude that,

[T]he picture that emerges is of a permissive culture of abuse of women within the organisation and in the surrounding community. Women had nowhere to turn to seek help, and efforts to resist, let alone report the abuse were penalised. The powerful positions of key male staff allowed them to control the narrative and the people who depend on the Kasigau project.

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