 I'm a conservationist and I knew from a very young age that that was what I wanted to do. We live in a country that's just blessed with this incredible diversity of large animals, elephants, rhinos, lions, cheetahs, you name it. And it seemed very natural to me that I would dedicate my life to protecting these animals. But my first job really did create a completely different realisation for me. My first job at the age of 18 was to measure the entire stockpile of Kenya's ivory. There I was at the National Museums of Kenya, measuring every one of thousands of tusks. And from the information that I could get, I realised that elephants in Kenya were being poached over time at younger and younger ages. We were getting females killed, calves, elephants only five years old. Now elephants live as long as humans. That means that we were having baby elephants five years old being shot dead for their teeth, which were being turned into trinkets for people in China and Japan. Well all my work went up in smoke in 1989. And on this day I realised that Kenya had the power to make a massive global political statement. And that really committed me to conservation for the rest of my life. This statement led to the banning of the ivory trade worldwide, and elephants began to recover. I joined Wildlife Direct in 2007 so that I could make a difference across the whole continent of Africa. I'm a scientist, but my work really is working with people at the front lines of conservation. I'm bringing their stories to a global audience so anybody anywhere can read stories from Africa, from people in the field, on the ground, at the front line, communities, ranges. Scientists telling their stories. This is an example of one of the blogs. We found a group of amazing Maasai moran warriors out on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, saving lions. It's really, really unusual. And through their blog they can raise attention to what they're doing, they can raise money and they can get donations and volunteers to come and help them. And lions really are a huge passion for me. As a Kenyan, lions really are our national symbol. Can you imagine Kenya without lions? It's almost impossible to imagine. Lions, however, are declining very rapidly. We used to have 15,000 lions just 10 years ago. Today we have fewer than 2,000 left in this country. And the reason why lions are declining is because of human wildlife conflict. Lions are being killed. Most of the range lands where lions occur is shared with people with their livestock, pastoralists, Maasai, Samburu. These landscapes are also shared with wildlife. Almost 75% of Kenya is semi-arid and this is the kind of land that they live in. Every seven years or so we have these fantastic droughts. In 2009, the last drought, we lost between 30 and 80% of our cattle as a result of the drought. And of course, wildlife died as well. Many herbivores died. Well, that put lions in a really difficult situation. They started killing livestock. When a community has lost so many of their livestock to the drought and then they start losing their livestock to lions, their tolerance is zero. And what happened in that year was a lot of lions started getting killed. Kenya loses more than 100 lions a year to this conflict with people. Almost 40% of the lions are killed with spears with traditional means by the pastoralists. But what we're seeing is a very disturbing trend. Increasingly people are using chemicals, pesticides and poisons to kill lions. And I'm going to draw your attention to the second tallest bar there, furidan. Furidan is a chemical that's been imported into this country for the agricultural development. It's really supposed to create the green revolution. But this chemical is deadly. It's so deadly that one container of furidan which is 100 grams can kill 250 lions. It comes in a salt shaker kind of container, sprinkled on the carcass of a cow that's been killed by lions. The lions will return to the kill, feed on it as a pride. They'll die within 15 minutes. And then hyenas come. They also die and then vultures as well and jackals. Anything that comes to this carcass will be killed. What I saw was I was looking at the blogs on Wildlife Direct. I'm looking at these blogs and I see that it's not just lions that are being killed by this chemical. The same chemical is being used to kill fish in Lake Victoria. The same chemical is being used to kill birds in Buñala, Muaya, Ahero, our grand irrigation schemes. We're killing birds to feed our people. These birds are killed for commercial trade. They're sold on the local markets. But the government didn't listen to us very much when we complained about the lions being killed. But the moment we revealed that this pesticide is being used to procure food for human consumption, they realised this is a public health crisis in the making. It's not just in Kenya though. Furidan is manufactured in the United States by a company called FMC. The US realised that this chemical was also dangerous to users, consumers and the environment. It was killing millions of birds, so they banned it in 2009. That didn't stop the manufacturers from pumping it into Africa, Asia and South America. We managed through our awareness, creation through Wildlife Direct locally and internationally to get this product removed from the shelves in Kenya. You can't find it in any chemist or agrivet anymore in this country. But sadly, all the product that was taken out of Kenya was dumped in Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda. And this is what the Ugandan said. So the impact of Wildlife Direct really has been to create an international awareness and a local reaction. So while there are many disappointing stories about conservation in Africa, it's not just lions, we're losing elephants, we're losing rhinos and cheetahs. I'm still smiling because what we're doing at Wildlife Direct is we're creating a community of people on the ground telling their stories, raising global awareness and actually impacting governments across this nation. Today we're influencing Kenyan legislation and Kenyan policies and it's all because the people who live on the ground with the wildlife, their say is now being taken into account. Thank you.