UNESCO's World Heritage Committee added 27 new sites to its World Heritage List this month, including Kenyan forests revered as sacred sites and sheltering some of the nation’s most important biodiversity.

The Mijikenda Kaya Forests include 11 separate forest sites spread across some 200 kilometers of the nation’s coast.

Regarded as sacred by the Mijikenda people, the forests contain the remains of numerous fortified villages known as kayas.

They also shelter the few remaining patches of indigenous forest in a landscape being increasingly converted to farmland. More than half of Kenya’s rare plants are found in the coastal region.

In announcing the designation, UNESCO said “the site is inscribed as bearing unique testimony to a cultural tradition and for its direct link to a living tradition.”

The kayas are regarded as the abodes of ancestors and maintained by a council of elders. All are designated as national monuments and many are home to innovative community-based projects, such as those helping to conserve the Muhaka and Kinondo kayas that have been supported by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund.

Source: Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF)eNews July 2008