Sam Mwandha is the Executive Director of Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), a government parastatal that has been set up to manage wildlife in Uganda. It also ensures that it liaises well with communities.
How relevant is this year’s United Nation’s World Wildlife Day theme, Partnerships for Wildlife Conservation?
It was an appropriate theme because before we have a national park like Lake Mburo and without partnerships you are just going to sink money into it to make sure wildlife is protected and you will not get anything back.
Then you will have a lot of challenges with communities because you don’t partner with them. You won’t have international organizations to support you if you don’t have partnerships.
Partners are key to wildlife conservation. We ensure that if there are NGOs interested in wildlife conservation they put in their efforts, communities, visitors and whoever has interest.
How do you factor the future in making partnerships?
We are of course mindful of the future. We support planting of forests for example in Kibale Forest, we are engaged in a partnership with Face the Future
in carbon financing. We sell carbon, bring money, share and invest into conservation and also into the communities that neighbour these protected areas.
Who are some of the key partners and how are they benefitting the tourism sector?
We also partner with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) which mainly works on research. The research information they collect helps us to make decisions. The other one is the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) which raises funds and gives them to us to handle any emergency issues.
They have helped us with conservancies where communities neighbouring protected areas benefit from their land through activities related to conservation. They helped us so much during COVID-19 time by providing equipment, and fuel to run our vehicles so that we could remain in control.
We have the Uganda Conservation Foundation (UCF) which focuses on working on supporting infrastructure development, especially the construction of joint operations command centres in Queen Elizabeth National Park and Murchison Falls National Park.
Another is nearly completed in Kidepo Valley National Park. This puts all the staff in one building with equipment that allows remote monitoring of various parts of the park rather than sending patrols all the time.
It helps us take swift responses. We also have other supporters like UNDP which has supported the construction of a community lodge in Kidepo. They also gave us good equipment for monitoring as well.
We have partners like WWF, USAID, then the European Union (EU) which is currently discussing a project in Eastern Uganda and the Karamoja area. I hope that starts before the end of this year. We have many other partners and are looking to see how we can get support from China, Russia and other development partners.
Please expound about the contribution of UNDP towards mitigating the reduction of biodiversity…
UNDP has provided us with funding. There was a project in Northern Uganda that covered Kidepo. It was managed by the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA).
It looked at planting of trees, creating awareness to the local communities to stop cutting the shear nut and supporting UWA authorities in dealing with conservers along Kidepo.
It was a project that ended about two years ago but it was very effective. Right now, UNDP has had some doses to support monitoring. They brought us very classy drones, six of them, so that our staff can stay in one place and still monitor what’s happening three km away.
They can fly, take pictures and be deployed to where you send them and arrest Poachers. We have some other partners like UTB, Tooro Kingdom and others. We are asking the kingdom to mobilize its subjects to plant trees. If they don’t plant trees, the nearby national parks will become their source of timber and wood. We have discussed this and the Tooro Kingdom is heading it.
Who are the most important or pivotal partners?
All partners are very important but for me, the most crucial ones are communities. As you may be aware, UWA is managing wildlife issues in communities all over the country each of these places has a community the biggest challenge they have is that wildlife goes into their gardens and damage crops, injure livestock and sometimes they kill and interestingly even where there are no protected areas, still there are problems.
Lake Victoria has crocodiles and hippos, so communities are the blood of our work. We are in a high gear of constructing electric fences. Already, a big part is done.
We are doing procurement for more. We make trenches so that buffalos do not disturb communities. We are also planning bee farming to help us on elephants but at the same time communities to harvest honey.
Other interventions we do with the communities include creating awareness, especially with hippos. They disturb fishermen but we inform them where they stay so that they can avoid them.
How else are you co-existing with communities neighbouring national parks and reserves?
Most of our people are sitting on small portions of land. They have no food, firewood and some needs of life are locked in protected areas like fish, medicinal herbs or products for weaving so what we do is to enter into agreements to make them access the protected areas and the process is controlled.
We have a law that 20 per cent of the benefits from gazetted areas are given to the neighbours, and over 40 billion shillings have been shared with the communities.
Between July 2022 and now we have already shared 3.5 billion shillings. I know there are another 800 million shillings to be shared among Kidepo and Lake Mburo and I think they have received their funds already.
The money makes projects that the communities have decided on. Between 2020 and 2022, the revenues were small but we have now recovered.
Where do the partnerships leave the tourist and tour operator?
The partnerships with tourists are difficult ones. The tourist comes literally not known, spends five days in the park- sleeping, eating, paying money and goes away but he is a very strong partner.
They bring in money. In the last year, UWA has become financially sustainable after a tough time during COVID-19 which affected us when our revenues dropped, and the government came in and supported us. The tour operator and guide is a very good partner because he/she markets our country to tourists who bring in money.
Who are the champions of conservation?
The champions of conservation I wish to mention are the Rangers. A ranger gives up his life to go out, patrol and prevent poachers. In doing their work, they meet with poachers with guns and sharp pangs. They are injured by animals. Much as they care for wildlife, the wildlife doesn’t care. They have gotten injuries, faced deaths and to me those are my heroes.
In my time of wildlife conservation, and this is not political, I have seen His Excellency, the president of Uganda, a high-level advocate of wildlife. He has consistently refused ideas of de-gazetting protected areas to the level of risking losing his votes.
I have been in meetings where even ministers put him under pressure to degazette some areas but he has withstood all pressures. If it found someone weaker, only looking at votes, most of the areas we have would have been degazetted already.
Before I became ED, we were celebrating 50 years of Kidepo Valley National Park and all politicians from Karamoja had a desire that part of that park be degazetted he was very clear in explaining to them that with the weather in Karamoja, they could not depend on sorghum but tourism could help them survive. By that time, Kidepo National Park was getting close to 2000 visitors a year and now we are over 20,000.
Money going in Kidepo has started growing. Currently, the money to be shared by Kidepo is 400 million shillings and the hope to increase is high and certain. Apart from the rangers, the other champions of conservation is the president as well as the communities. By the virtue of staying near the conservancies, these people are challenged and suffering by having their food eaten when animals escape.
Please shed some more light on infrastructural development in terms of roads and more in the protected areas…
Currently, we have a World Bank project in protected areas for smart climate and environment. We have got some of the resources required for that project. We have resources to build 24 units where rangers stay in the most difficult areas.
The same project is going to provide funding for building visitor centres, especially accommodation facilities for schools that visit our protected areas in selected sites like four or five of them. I know about Semliki National Park.
We want to increase the size of the accommodation we have in some areas. The World Bank project will help us to get tractors, grader bulldozers and a few machines so that we are able to open new roads as well as maintain old ones in the protected areas.
We want to ask the Ministry of Finance to enable us to provide water dams since animals have issues in dry seasons. We also have projects related to Rhino Sanctuary like at Zziwa and accommodation for staff. We already have 1.5 billion shillings set aside and looking for more money through partners.
