Paula Kahumbu: The Kenyan conservationist behind the "Hands Off Our Elephants" movement

Long before Paula Kahumbu became one of Kenya’s best-known conservationists, she was the Nairobi girl carrying lizards, snakes and frogs to her neighbour, famed palaeoanthropologist Richard Leakey, for identification.

That curiosity became a career in ecology, wildlife advocacy and conservation education.

Today, Kahumbu is the CEO of WildlifeDirect and a National Geographic Explorer whose work has focused heavily on elephants and wildlife crime.

From Biology to Elephant Conservation

Kahumbu studied ecology and biology at the University of Bristol, earned a master’s degree at the University of Florida and completed her PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University in 2002.

Her connection with elephants deepened during her research in Kenya.

After university, she was involved in examining more than 2,000 confiscated elephant tusks, an experience that exposed her to the scale of the ivory trade and helped shape the conservation work that followed.

She later joined WildlifeDirect, the conservation organization founded by Richard Leakey, and became its CEO.

Hands Off Our Elephants

A defining chapter came with Hands Off Our Elephants, the campaign Kahumbu led with the support of former First Lady Margaret Kenyatta.

The campaign pushed elephant poaching and ivory trafficking into Kenya’s public conversation, while her wider work included Eyes in the Courtroom, which monitored wildlife crime cases and advocated for stronger enforcement of conservation laws.

The Whitley Fund for Nature credits a wider effort involving government and NGOs with helping reduce elephant poaching in Kenya by 80 percent over five years.

When Conservation Became a Story

Kahumbu also understood something that does not always come naturally to scientists.

Facts alone do not necessarily make people care.

Her work in conservation storytelling grew from there.

She became the force behind Wildlife Warriors, a wildlife documentary series made by Africans for African audiences, bringing conservationists and their work directly to television viewers.

The first season aired in Kenya in 2019 and was later distributed across 26 African countries. Kahumbu subsequently took that storytelling to a global audience as a presenter on National Geographic’s Secrets of the Elephants.

The approach has remained central to her work at WildlifeDirect, alongside conservation education and environmental justice.

Awards and honors

The international recognition has followed a career spent moving between research, advocacy and storytelling.

Kahumbu won the Whitley Award in 2014 and the Whitley Gold Award in 2021, the latter worth £100,000 in project funding.

She was named Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year in 2021, and received Kenya’s Order of the Grand Warrior for outstanding service.

In 2022, she joined the National Geographic Society Board of Trustees as an Explorer Trustee and was named one of the Financial Times’ 25 Most Influential Women of 2022.

She also sits on the WWF International board.

In June 2026, her work was featured in the newly opened National Geographic Museum of Exploration in Washington, DC, where an exhibit traces her conservation career.