About The Dopoi Center
Our Mission
To provide a home for collaboration between the Maasai community and the world beyond through education and Indigenous based tourism.
Our Story
The Dopoi Center is named for Dopoi Olol Dapash, a leader of the Purko section of the Maasai community, who lived between 1885 and 2001, and was a radical anti-colonial leader of the Maa Nation.
The Dopoi Center was founded in 2007 as a center for community organizing, cultural survival, and conservation. Today, the Dopoi Center is an established tourist destination offering a wide range of amenities and guest experiences.
Our Vision
A Maasai community that occupies our homeland as a distinct society, that welcomes all peoples who respect our culture, the wildlife and the land itself, and that has the economic security and political power to determine our own future.
Partnerships
The Dopoi Center is the East African home of the Institute for Maasai Education, Research & Conservation (MERC), a justice based international organization, founded in 1987 and directed since by Meitamei Olol Dapash. MERC organizes campaigns for Maasai land rights, wildlife and ecosystem protection through Indigenous Maasai knowledge, decolonized research and Maasai history.
The Dopoi Center is also home to a Prescott College field station. Prescott College is an Arizona-based liberal arts college that has been standing with the Maasai community since 2004 and collaborating on land rights research, university education, water projects and other work.
Dopoi established and supports the Mara Guides Association (MGA), the Maasai tour guides union. MGA's vision is for greater employment for Maasai people and supports Maasai stewardship of the Maasai Mara through cultural coexistence with wildlife.
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