November 20, 2023
Following an extensive independent third-party investigation, Wildlife Works has terminated the head of security at our Kasigau Corridor project for gross misconduct, including conduct in violation of the company’s policy against sexual harassment. Our internal investigation is continuing in order to establish the circumstances surrounding all the allegations and to open a safe network for our employees to come forward with any further information.
We also terminated the HR manager on the basis that he created a culture of fear and intimidation that, according to interviewed personnel, prevented reporting of sexual harassment incidents. These individuals had previously been suspended immediately following our receipt of a letter from Somo in August 2023.
We firmly condemn these individuals’ behaviours. We sincerely apologize to the women and families directly affected, all our employees, our stakeholder communities in Kenya and our customers and partners around the world.
We realize that it is our responsibility to do more than apologize. We are committed to learning from this experience to ensure such behaviours never occur again in any of our projects around the world.
We have hired a female Kenyan counselor who is on site for several weeks to conduct listening sessions with staff and to provide ongoing support for the women affected as well as all employees who wish to speak with her. Part of this healing process will be to provide effective remediation to the women in our company and in the community who were directly affected.
We will not stop there. We need to continue to rebuild trust with our employees, the community who rely on the revenue from the sale of carbon credits for many essential community development needs, the customers who buy those credits, and the wider public. For this, we are committed to do the hard work to continue bringing about long-term and lasting positive change.
Beyond our zero tolerance policy, we are committed to ensuring a safe workplace with effective and anonymous reporting mechanisms. In addition to hiring Kenyan experts to help us create new processes, we have been holding a series of internal grievance meetings to understand from our employees how we can improve the way we work with them and our partner communities on safeguarding measures. The counselor will also be auditing our policies and procedures and assisting in the creation of our future grievance and human resources reporting policies. Already these actions have been productive.
We are in the process of forming a gender steering committee for the project whose members will be decided by the female staff. They will play a pivotal role in designing company policies and our ongoing engagement of gender rights specialists.
We will also be undertaking leadership and accountability training at all levels of the company.
Finally, out of an abundance of caution and concern, we will be carrying out independent investigations at our other global project sites and regional offices to make sure we go above and beyond the international safeguarding standards.
We have always believed in radical transparency and that includes being willing to talk openly about what happened and remediate it, very firmly and rigourously. In that spirit we will be fully transparent about our progress on this journey and will continue to update you.
We are open to answering any questions or listening to suggestions. Please contact us: or email at press at wildlifeworks dot com
