Journal30 September 2025
Three years of the community partnership
In 2022 we committed to hiring locally, sourcing locally, and paying landing fees that actually reached landowners. Here is the audit.
Three years ago we committed to three things: hire at least 70 percent of staff from within a 50-kilometer radius of the launch site, source breakfast ingredients from Narok County where possible, and pay landing fees directly into group-ranch accounts rather than through third-party concessionaires.
Where we landed
Staffing: 78 percent local. Sourcing: 63 percent. (Champagne is not from Narok County. We acknowledge this.) Landing fees: 100 percent direct. That last one was harder than we expected — it required opening bank accounts in three ranches.
We also quietly abandoned one thing: a plan to train local pilots. It turned out the training requirements from the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority were longer than our timeline, and we didn't want to promise something we couldn't deliver. We have two Kenyan pilots in training now; both should be licensed by early 2027.
Promises should be the exact size of what you can actually do.