Segera Conservancy
Segera is around 50,000 acres of Laikipia County that used to be a cattle ranch and was deliberately allowed to become something else. It is owned by Jochen Zeitz, it is run on the framework of the Zeitz Foundation he established in 2008, and in 2025 it received a founder population of black rhino. It is also the most unusual proposition in Laikipia, because Segera is run as a single retreat rather than as a conservancy with camps on it.
A Rewilded Ranch
Segera’s own account of what happened here is blunt about the starting point. Zeitz describes the project as rewilding Segera from a derelict cattle ranch into a thriving biodiversity landscape and a safe haven for some of the most endangered species on the planet.
The work has been done over roughly two decades and it is the ordinary, unglamorous kind: fences removed, grazing pressure taken off, indigenous trees put back. The Tree of Life reforestation project has planted three million trees. Wildlife returned as the land recovered rather than because it was stocked.
Alongside the land work sits a set of projects that would look out of place on most safari properties: solar installations, permaculture gardens, beading co-operatives and Waterbank schools designed to harvest and store their own water. Visitors can be taken round them.
The Four Cs
Segera is run on the Zeitz Foundation’s framework of Conservation, Community, Culture and Commerce, the four pillars the foundation has promoted since 2008 as a way of making ecosystem management pay for itself without any one of the four being sacrificed to the others. Segera is the place where the framework is demonstrated rather than described, and the property is affiliated to The Long Run, the network of tourism businesses committed to that kind of balance.
Whether the framework does real work or is a way of describing what a well-run property would do anyway is a reasonable thing for a visitor to form their own view on, and the property is unusually open to being asked.
Black Rhino at Segera
In May 2025 Kenya Wildlife Service began translocating 21 eastern black rhinos to Segera from Ol Pejeta Conservancy, under the National Black Rhino Action Plan. The move was intended to relieve pressure on established sanctuaries, including Lewa and Lake Nakuru, by creating new secure breeding ground.
It is the second such move in the same programme and the same landscape. In early 2024, 21 black rhinos went to Loisaba from three source populations, making Loisaba Kenya’s seventeenth black rhino breeding sanctuary. Both moves are consequences of an uncomfortable kind of success: Kenya’s black rhino population crossed 1,000 at the end of 2023 for the first time in four decades, reaching 1,004, having fallen to approximately 384 by 1989, and the long-established sanctuaries have been running out of room.
Claims circulate that the Segera project will eventually form the largest uninterrupted rhino sanctuary in the world across several hundred thousand acres. The announcement’s own wording is more careful, describing an ambition to create one of the largest rhino sanctuaries in the world by connecting Segera to other conservation areas in the region. That is a conditional future claim about a connected landscape, not a present claim about Segera’s own 50,000 acres, and it is worth reading as such.
Wildlife
Segera describes itself as a big five oasis, and the species present reflect a recovered rather than a stocked landscape: elephant, buffalo, lion, leopard and now black rhino, alongside the northern dry-country animals that define the Laikipia plateau. Reticulated giraffe and Grevy’s zebra are the significant ones. Grevy’s zebra are Endangered, with the Grevy’s Zebra Trust’s 2018 count putting 2,812 of a global 3,042 in Kenya, confined to Samburu, Marsabit and Laikipia counties. Reticulated giraffe are also assessed as Endangered, at 20,901 by the Giraffe Conservation Foundation’s figure.
Birdlife is substantial, as it is across the plateau, and the varied habitat that came with the rewilding is part of why.
Visiting Segera
The access model is the thing to understand before planning anything. Segera is not an open conservancy with lodges on it and it is not a destination with a gate. It operates as a single retreat, which means the property tends to be taken as a whole or in small numbers, and the experience is correspondingly private and correspondingly hard to slot into a conventional itinerary.
No conservancy entry fee is published, and as private land in Laikipia County rather than a national park, no Kenya Wildlife Service schedule applies. Access is arranged directly with the property.
Segera sits in the same landscape as the rest of the plateau, reached from Nairobi by road through Nanyuki or by air from Wilson Airport to a Laikipia airstrip. Anyone weighing it against the alternatives should read the Laikipia guide, which sets out how the plateau’s conservancies differ in access, ownership and activity range.
Questions Travellers Ask About Segera
Can anyone stay at Segera?
It is arranged directly with the property rather than treated as ordinary inventory, and the retreat model means the place is often taken privately. There is no gate, no published entry tariff and no day-visit arrangement. Travellers looking for a conservancy they can simply enter should look at Ol Pejeta, which publishes a tariff and runs public gates.
What is the difference between Segera and the other Laikipia conservancies?
Scale of operation more than scale of land. Lewa, Borana and Loisaba are conservancies with several camps and a steady flow of guests. Segera is one property run as a single retreat on 50,000 acres, with a foundation-led programme attached. The wildlife is the plateau’s; the visitor experience is far more private and far less flexible.
Are there rhinos at Segera?
Yes, since 2025, when Kenya Wildlife Service moved 21 eastern black rhinos there from Ol Pejeta under the National Black Rhino Action Plan. That is a founder population in a large area rather than an established one, so sightings are not comparable with Lewa or Ol Pejeta, where the populations are far larger and decades older.
What are the four Cs?
Conservation, Community, Culture and Commerce, the framework the Zeitz Foundation has used since 2008 to argue that ecosystem management has to deliver on all four to hold. At Segera the visible outputs are the reforestation programme, the solar and permaculture work, the beading co-operatives and the Waterbank schools, all of which can be visited.
Is Segera a good first safari?
Probably not, for the same reasons it is a good second or third one. The wildlife density and the guaranteed-sighting rhythm that make a first Kenyan safari satisfying are found in the Maasai Mara and the big parks. Segera suits travellers who already know what a game drive is and are more interested in privacy, in a recovered landscape and in how a conservation model is financed.
No operator on the marketplace currently lists a safari to Segera Conservancy.
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