The president of the World Bank will appeal directly to President Uhuru Kenyatta to resolve a Kenyan human rights crisis in which thousands of indigenous forest people have been forcibly evicted from a reserve in the name of water conservation.

After a board meeting in Washington, Jim Yong Kim said: “I will personally reach out to President Kenyatta and the government of Kenya to offer our full support in order to bring together the Cherangany-Sengwer people and all the key parties. Everyone’s goal is surely to find a lasting, peaceful resolution to this long unfinished business of land rights in Kenya.”

The meeting was the last chance that the Sengwer indigenous people had of being allowed to remain in parts of the Embobut forest in the Cherangani hills, where they have lived for centuries as hunter gatherers. Having been mostly evicted by staff of the government’s Kenyan forest service, they had appealed to the board and proposed a solution.

The Sengwer had been given some hope that the board would step in because a leaked internal investigation by the bank’s independent inspection panel said the Kenya natural resource management project had not fully followed bank guidelines.

Board members accepted that there had been a “lack of recognition and protection of [Sengwer] customary rights”. “More attention should have been given from the outset to better identify and mitigate the risk that evictions might occur and that the correct application of the safeguard policies may have prevented or mitigated these harms,” said the board after the meeting.

“The long history of tension on land and resource rights made for a very challenging project environment from the outset, a situation that was exacerbated by the ethnic unrest that followed the 2007 elections. [We] recognised that land issues have a deep, historical legacy in Kenya, and further noted that, given this, the bank’s role must be calibrated carefully so that the bank is viewed as a partner helping to foster dialogue,” it added.

“I welcome the inspection panel’s conclusions that the World Bank is not linked to the evictions, and thank the panel for recognising that we spoke out forcefully once we became aware of them and the harsh impact they were having on evicted families,” said Kim.

The bank will now organise and support a major consultation that will ensure that the Cherangany-Sengwer people are given a say in their own future. The Kenya forest service and other relevant government departments will be invited to participate.

“We welcome the board decision and the fact that the Word Bank president is going to start the consultation himself with President Uhuru Kenyatta. This is very positive and we hope that management, especially in the country level, will give it this kind of seriousness,” said Peter Kitelo of the Kenya Forest Indigenous Peoples Network on behalf of the Sengwer.

“Our proposals would ensure that communities regain the rights to their lands and at the same time become custodians of the forest. This is the new conservation paradigm that is increasingly being adopted,” he added.