How the Survey Was Done

In 2024, three Forward Consulting staff spent eight months tracing graduates from LAMP's training attendance records. They contacted 255 people across eight years of delivery, from the 2017–18 cohort through to 2024. Of those, 132 were women (52%) and 123 were men (48%). 181 interviews were face-to-face (71%). 74 were by phone (29%).

Names came from attendance records. The sample is everyone who could be reached, not a selection for success. From a pool of around 1,500 reachable graduates, a sample of 255 carries a 95% confidence level with a margin of error of ±5%.

Alongside the quantitative measures, the survey recorded 1,937 open-text responses.

Changes in Behaviour

The survey asked graduates about four specific behaviours, before LAMP and after LAMP: attend meetings, speak up in meetings, participate in decisions, and propose solutions. Each was scored on a frequency scale from never to always. The tables below show the percentage who answered "always".

The gender breakdown shows that women entered with far lower starting rates, as low as 7% proposing solutions. Men started higher. Both groups finished in the 92–95% band.

ZERO DECAY AT THREE TO SEVEN YEARS

Sustaining behaviour change once a training program ends is one of the most documented challenges in conservation and development. A systematic review of 54 behaviour change studies found that most interventions have small positive effects or none at all. A PNAS study of 136 community-based conservation projects across 40 countries found that only 43% showed behavioural success.

The LAMP survey does not show this pattern.

The strongest evidence comes from the 2022 cohort, the largest single group in the survey at n=101. Surveyed two to three years after training, they scored 94 to 96 per cent across all four behaviours, above the most recent cohort (n=46, surveyed within months of finishing) on every measure. The full six-cohort table below shows the pattern across all years of delivery.

The table below takes the four behavioural measures from the previous section and splits them by the year each cohort was trained. The oldest cohort was trained seven to eight years before the survey. The newest was trained less than a year before. There has been no formal follow-up support between training and survey.

The pattern differs from what sector-baseline research typically finds. The oldest cohorts score highest on every measure. The newest cohort, surveyed within months of finishing, scores lowest. The behaviours measured do not decay with time; they continue to embed.

LEADERSHIP ROLES AND THE GENDER GAP

The result that stands out is the closing of the gender gap.

Women entered LAMP with 55% already in a leadership role of some kind, 30 points behind men at 85%. By the time they finished, 99% of women held a leadership role, compared to 97% of men. A gap that mirrors the broader inequality across the sector had been eliminated.

For scale: the World Economic Forum and UNECA project that gender parity in African leadership will not be reached until 2063. The figures above come from one program, LAMP, delivered as three or four monthly modules to over 2,000 participants from Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia and Uganda since 2014.

OF THOSE WHO CAME IN WITH NO LEADERSHIP ROLE

66 graduates held no leadership role of any kind before LAMP. 54 were women, 12 were men.

The group was 82% female. In these communities, women are far less likely than men to hold any leadership role before LAMP, so they make up most of the graduates who entered with none. What it shows is that LAMP does not work only on people who arrive with standing to build on. It works on people who arrive with none.

The figures exclude respondents who already worked at partner conservation organisations such as Grevy's Zebra Trust, Northern Rangelands Trust and Ewaso Lions. For those respondents, a conservation role before LAMP was a feature of their employment rather than a position LAMP created.

The clearer measure is what happened to those who entered with no conservation role at all. 82 graduates fell into that category. After LAMP, 59 of them (72%) hold one.

CONSERVATION ROLES

The proportion of graduates holding a conservation-related role rose from 64% to 88%.

"I was a board member but I understand nothing about the conservancy. I am confident now about my leadership position because I am informed. It opened my mind and now I feel now I can even proudly go and speak about conservancy in front of everyone, I know what to say."

> Wote Lepina. Board Member, Nkoteiya Conservancy, Kenya.

WHAT THE OPEN-TEXT RESPONSES SHOW

Alongside the quantitative measures, the survey collected 1,937 open-text responses. Thematic analysis of those responses identified three patterns, each independently frequent enough to count as a finding in its own right.

Awakening

119 of the 255 graduates used metaphors of waking up, or of eyes being opened, without being prompted. Over 15% of all comments referenced variants of "I was blind, but now I see" or "I was in darkness". The curriculum teaches leadership and management, but its most reliable function is to remove the perceived ceiling on what participants believe is possible for themselves.

"My family is staying in harmony unlike before where I fight them most of the time. I involve all my family in decision making process for example when I want to sell a goat I also give my wives a chance to select which goat is to be sold. My wives are now free and also my elder boys tell me I have become a good father. LAMP has helped me to set my family vision and understand conservancy vision which is to advocate conservation."

> Lenantoyie. Board Member, Sera Conservancy, Kenya.

Family Harmony

295 comments describe improved household peace and reduced domestic conflict. Every respondent reported an increase in status and confidence within the family. This matters structurally rather than sentimentally. A woman cannot take up leadership roles if her participation causes conflict at home. Capacity-building research has rarely treated the household as a site of change.

"Before LAMP I was dormant and now I run an M-Pesa business, a shop and I keep goats plus sheep for sale. I was a very quiet person and could not talk to people. Now I can empower women and help change their thinking. I am also teaching women to stop cutting down trees for charcoal. I helped a lady start chicken farming so that she can stop cutting down trees for charcoal burning."

> Gilliant Rotich. Finance Officer, Isiolo Voice of Women, Leparua Conservancy, Kenya

Economic decoupling

97% of graduates established new income streams after LAMP. These are incomes that do not depend on cutting trees, killing wildlife, or extracting more from the land than it can sustain. When a leader has a stable business, their commitment to the conservancy shifts from a temporary job to a long-term interest.

LAMP AND THE PUBLISHED RESEARCH

The table compares LAMP's survey findings with published sector research.

Download the Decade of Evidence →

ON THE SURVEY METHODOLOGY

The survey was drawn from LAMP's training attendance records. Everyone reachable was contacted, and 255 of the roughly 1,500 reachable graduates responded. The sample is not random in the statistical sense, nor is it selected for success. It is a reachability-based sample from a contactable pool.

The survey does not include a control group. Without one, secular trends cannot be formally ruled out. The consistency across all cohorts, and the absence of any follow-up support between training and survey, make secular trends an unlikely full explanation. They cannot be excluded by this study alone.

This approach addresses a known problem in evaluation research. Howard's 1980 work on response-shift bias established that participants' standard for self-assessment shifts during training, so the criterion they apply before differs from the criterion they apply after. In leadership and behaviour-change contexts, this typically means pre-training self-ratings are inflated: participants overrate themselves because they have no clear reference frame for what trained behaviour looks like. Once trained, they rate themselves more accurately. A conventional pre-post comparison then understates real change, because the pre-training number was already too high. Retrospective measurement asks for both ratings from the same vantage point after training, so both 'before' and 'after' rest on the same understanding of what the behaviour looks like.

A reader might still ask whether graduates are simply reporting what they think the researcher wants to hear. If they were, the most recent cohort, closest to the training and most likely to give the flattering answer, would score highest. They do not. Graduates trained seven and eight years ago score at or above the 2024 cohort on every measure. That pattern is inconsistent with answers shaped by what the researcher seems to want.

The two earliest cohorts, 2017–18 (n=11) and 2019 (n=20), are small. They carry limited statistical weight on their own. The zero decay finding relies on the direction holding across all six cohorts, not on those two alone.

All measures are self-reported and the survey did not include independent observation. The 1,937 open-text responses provide an internal check on the quantitative data: graduates name specific actions taken and people helped, including charcoal burning stopped, businesses started, and neighbours and family members named, in a level of detail and consistency rarely produced by confirmation bias alone.

The 1,243 graduates not reached are those whose contact details could not be matched, despite active work to trace updated phone numbers.

The survey instrument and the anonymised dataset are available on request.

All survey and documentary participants provided informed consent and retain the right to withdraw their data or footage at any time. Where named individuals appear in survey verbatims or on film, they have specifically consented to that named use.

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