The Elephant Queen

Human-wildlife conflict is one of the most pressing challenges facing conservation today, and as Kenya’s population grows, the space shared between people and wildlife continues to shrink. The Elephant Queen Outreach Program takes on this challenge through the power of story, using film, theatre, music, puppetry, and dance to bring conservation to life in the schools and communities most affected by it.

Born from the award-winning documentary The Elephant Queen, which follows elephant matriarch Athena and her herd through themes of love, loss, and resilience, the Outreach Program has, since 2021, carried that story across Kenya, prioritising communities where human-wildlife conflict is a daily reality. Travelling aboard a customised 4×4 lorry fitted with solar-powered screens and theatre equipment, the program’s team of Kenyan conservation and engagement specialists brings the film to life in Kiswahili, Maa, or English, followed by an interactive theatre performance that opens the floor to dialogue on coexistence.

Over its first two years, the program reached more than 135,000 people across 226 schools and 180 communities, covering 24,000 kilometres and supporting over 50 existing conservation education programmes along the way. Independent research has since confirmed what the team saw on the ground: that these community screenings measurably increased tolerance, knowledge, and empathy towards elephants, particularly among children.

Save the Elephants is proud to be an active fundraising partner of The Elephant Queen Outreach Program, supporting its continued reach across Kenya’s schools and communities. It’s a partnership rooted in a shared belief: that changing hearts and minds is just as vital to elephant conservation as changing behaviour on the ground, and that a single evening under an outdoor screen can be the beginning of a lifelong connection to the animals next door.