Tanya Saunders
"My name is Tanya Saunders. I was born on the 4th July 1973, in Denmark, to an Kenyan/English father and Danish mother, but was taken home to Kenya when I was just two months old. This was to be the country where I spent my childhood and much of the first 30 years of my life... and indeed where I have chosen to settle. Inevitably, life has always brought me back to Africa, time and again…
"My father moved from Rhodesia (as it was then) to Kenya in the 1950s, when he was 19 years old, and joined the National Parks service as a game warden. However due to his bad hearing (nerve damage from bombs during the war), he had trouble with certain aspects of the job (firing a rifle, radio communications when flying aeroplanes, and so on) and felt he could have more impact as a wildlife film-maker. Over the years, he has become one of the most highly respected film-makers in his field, and has also worked on many big budget feature films like “Out of Africa” and “Gorillas in the Mist”, for example. In 1998, he gave up all commercial film-making and launched the African Environmental Film Foundation, a non-profit charity making educational films about environmental issues in Africa, for the people of Africa, in their own languages.
"My childhood was charmed in many ways - the older I get and the more I see of the world, the more I am reminded of the uniqueness of my upbringing. Due to the amount of publicity gained and direct assistance to the National Parks given as a result of my father’s films, we were able to build a house and live inside the Tsavo East National Park. My father still lives there today. matic beasts!) and again being surrounded by all manner of exotic orphaned animals, from vervet monkeys to buffalo...
"After a couple of years, I left Kenya again to study Law at Edinburgh University (I never wanted to be a lawyer but felt it was a relevant preparation for whichever direction I chose to take in life). Following university, I had an early career in eco-friendly retail, which led me to founding my my own company, “Afromania Ltd”, designing and wholesaling stationery products, from greeting cards to writing paper, gift wrap, calendars, etc. Over the next eight years, I built up the company to become the dominant “fancy” stationery supplier in East Africa, exporting from Kenya throughout the region. Not surprisingly, the themes behind all my work were always the colours, cultures and wildlife of Africa...
"I met Ian Saunders, my husband, in 2001, and since then life has not slowed on the adventure front…Together we have travelled with our work and at play to Chile, the USA, France, Spain, Tanzania, Costa Rica….we even spent three years living in the Highlands of Scotland, during which period Ian spent most of the time working in Afghanistan and I spent a lot of time traveling to New York where I was working on a number of challenging design projects. But, eventually, Africa and conservation called us back, and we have returned again, not just to Tsavo and Kenya, but to work once again with the African Environmental Film Foundation, of which we are still Directors today. ..
"In 2012, in response to the urgent need to provide conservation support in the region, Ian and I, alongside our co-founders Nzioki wa Makau, Richard Moller and Vanessa Watts, formed Tsavo Trust, a Kenyan not-for-profit organisation working in support of wildlife, habitat and communities in the greater Tsavo ecosystem. Tsavo Trust takes a hands-on, pragmatic approach to the integrated challenges of wildlife conservation and human development. Conservation in today's world has much wider implications than before; today, conservation is not just about wildlife protection (though that remains important), but is now also a matter of security (it is widely documented that wildlife products like ivory and rhino horn and other natural resources are used to fund extremist and organized criminal groups), economics, human development and ecology/biodiversity. At Tsavo Trust, we believe that long-term solutions need to take into account all these different aspects. One of our current goals is to build a strategic partnership between our two organisations, Tsavo Trust and the African Environmental Film Foundation - the latter providing conservation education and highlighting conservation challenges, with Tsavo Trust responding by providing realistic solutions on the ground. I feel like my life's experience to date - my conservation background spanning my entire life since childhood, my legal training, my business background, my not-for-profit/fund development experience - has all been leading towards this moment and the formation of this new dynamic organisation. Tsavo Trust - I hope - will now become the rest of my life's work.
"I continue to be involved in business in Kenya on a private level, as Director of African Greetings Ltd, a Kenyan design company specializing in greeting cards." [1]
