Living with Wildlife: three years on

It’s 9am in Pakwach district, Uganda. The villages here border the Nile River, a resource that usually supports their way of life through fishing, but today things are different. After a prolonged drought, the river has flooded, and the crops planted so painstakingly last season are at risk, not just from the water, but from hippos.

Conflict between people and wildlife is no stranger to this region of Uganda. Pakwach sits along the Nile, which separates it from Uganda’s oldest National Park, Murchison Falls. The park is home to elephants, hippos, lions and the endangered Rothschild’s Giraffe.

The people here have traditionally fished for a living, but the river has been overexploited and now long-overdue government quotas are putting even that modest existence under threat. Without an alternative source of income, people have no choice but to travel across the river in small boats to poach wild bushmeat.

It’s a dangerous living. Many people have died in pursuit of food to feed their families, or have been badly injured, like Ujeni (pictured). Sometimes endangered wildlife get caught in the traps left to catch bushmeat. When that happens, poachers looking for food leave the struggling animals, because they are too large or dangerous to attempt to free or eat.

Today, however, it seems the wildlife has come to them.

Dr Julius Adubango grew up in this area. He knows how hard it is to make a living here, and has been working tirelessly as a project coordinator with Ripple Effect to help provide alternative livelihoods for people living in Pakwach.

After finally winning the community’s trust and encouraging them to adopt sustainable farming, he can’t believe this is their reward - all that work to feed the local hippos? It was time to change tactic.

One year previously, Ripple Effect teamed up with wildlife conservation charity Tusk and their local partner Uganda Conservation Foundation (UCF) to find a solution to human-wildlife conflict in the Pakwach region.

Together, they ran a campaign to raise funds for the ‘Living with Wildlife’ project, and raised over one million pounds, which was doubled by the UK government to £2.6 million.

The project had a clear plan: Ripple Effect staff would train participants in groups to farm sustainably and build their business skills. UCF would educate local people on the value of the park, and improve strained relationships between communities and the park Authorities.

This included taking people on tours of Murchison Falls - something which, amazingly, most of the residents of Pakwach had never done before.

These interventions would, hopefully, help people to transition away from poaching and towards economic independence, protecting people and wildlife.

The project began in October 2020, which was at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Facing a very different set of circumstances to those they had planned for, the team were adapting from day one.

The coronavirus lockdowns made it difficult to get people together into groups, so training in sustainable farming and education on the nearby National Park slowed considerably. Besides poaching and fishing, tourism was one of the only ways locally to make money - and the industry collapsed almost overnight.

All of this put more pressure on the park, and meant that the number of people that were food secure dropped from an already low baseline of 17%.

This area of northern Uganda usually enjoys two rainy seasons per year. That same year, it experienced just one. Dr Julius has a theory that this area is a ‘canary in the coalmine’ for the extreme weather that can be expected across Uganda, if we don’t halt the climate crisis.

Local experts corroborate this theory, and ordinary people are unequipped to grow traditional crops in this new environment

For a project that was dependent on rain-fed agriculture, a two-year drought was a major challenge. Ripple Effect responded by introducing drought-resistant cassava varieties, a staple crop that usually takes two years to mature.

This variety of cassava is ready to eat in just nine months, meaning that it only needs one rainy season to mature. It was so successful that many people outside of the project also adopted it.

Ripple Effect also invested in twelve new solar-powered mini-irrigation systems and set up cooperatives so that farmers could share the technology and, crucially, water their crops, using the River Nile.

Food security began to increase, and finally project workers were able to start work on the business skills to help farmers link up with sustainable markets.

Then, after two years of droughts, the Nile flooded, and local hippos took this as their sign to eat as much of the farmers crops as they could before the waters receded.

When this happened, Dr Julius diverted project budget into setting up 140 apprenticeships for young people with local artisans in trades such as tailoring, hairdressing and motorcycle repair.

As we look back on this extraordinary story now that the project is completed, we celebrate the wins. Despite the fact that the project may not have achieved the initial impact target that we set of 70% of participants reaching food security, 38,000 people in Pakwach now have access to new ways of producing food and making a living.

Thanks to the Living with Wildlife project, 38,000 people now have improved food security, increased livelihood opportunities, and more positive relations with Uganda Wildlife Authority.

31% of participants are now earning above the international poverty line of £1.90 per day, despite the pandemic, drought and flooding. The rest have built resilience and skills that will help them to succeed in the future.

43% of farmers had four or more income generating activities by the end of the project, a tenfold increase up from 4%.

54% of people are now eating 6 or more food types daily, up from 4% at the start of the project, and there has been a 47% increase in food security.

All of these interventions have reduced pressure on the National Park and also supported a community through an extremely vulnerable moment in time, affected by a pandemic, the climate crisis and a cost of living crisis.

Helping people to become more self-sufficient in these circumstances is undoubtably more of a challenge, but we couldn't be more proud of the project participants for their tenacity and will to succeed.

We’re all dependant on natural resources to live, but for communities living directly off the land, that relationship is felt more deeply. What this project has shown is that for all our sakes, we need to safeguard nature to protect people.

And we need more collaborative projects like this, to ensure people have access to food, education and dignified employment, to protect nature.