KBC Show Wins US Award

KBC’s wildlife TV series Wildlife Warriors was recognised at the prestigious 2021 Jackson Wild media festival in the USA. 

The episode titled Samburu Lions in the show is the one that won the hearts of the organisers of the awards. It received a Special Jury Recognition in the category of Global Voices at the media festival.

The KBC show is filmed and produced by a Kenyan conservation organisation and airs every week on the station 

The series is produced by Paula Kahumbu who is also the host. Kahumbu is a renowned Kenyan conservationist who won the Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year on June 15, 2021, and the Whitley Gold Award in May 2021. She is the Chief Executive Officer of WildlifeDirect.

“I am so proud of my team at WildlifeDirect and Vivid Features film production as well as our amazing donors at USAid, The Wild Lives Foundation, and National Geographic,†she said after being feted.

The series is the first wildlife documentary series made by Africans. The series was created out of an article run by The New Yorker and written by journalist Jon Lee Anderson, A Kenyan Ecologist’s Crusade to save her Country’s Wildlife, published in the February 2021 issue.

The series has performed extremely well. Two episodes from season one of Wildlife Warriors were selected for screening at the New York Wildlife Conservation Film Festival in October 2019 and one film was shortlisted for a prize in the Latin American Nature Awards in 2020. 

Its production was funded by the U.S. Government, through USAID and in partnership with the U.S. Department of the Interior, The Wild Lives Foundation, and National Geographic.

The award that the series scooped was established in 1991. It is an annual festival that is held in Jackson, Wyoming, US. The competition attracted over 600 entries all over the world battling it out for 30 awards.

The Global Voices, the category in which the KBC show bagged the award, aims to highlight stories presented from local perspectives and created by local filmmakers from countries in the global South.

The Samburu Lions that was feted features the works of Samburu conservation hero, Jeneria Lekilelei, and his team of warriors working for Ewaso Lions, a conservation organisation in the West Gate Conservancy of Samburu County. 

The whole programme was created to promote peaceful co-existence between people and wild animals.

Photo of lion climbing up a tree taken on Jan 17, 2021, by Norwegian photographer Olav Thockle at Masai Mara Game Reserve, Kenya.

The Daily Mail