Uganda

Elephants, Crops and People

Queen Elizabeth National Park

Mission Statement: To support Uganda's wildlife and elephant conservation recovery and to enhance the local community and National Park relations in the Inshasha region Queen Elizabeth National park.

FOC is pleased to be supporting the work of Michael Keigwin and his team. The ECP seeks to address the conflicts between the elephant population, which is beginning to recover from years of poaching, and local comunities

In the 1970s elephants roamed over 70% of Uganda. They are now confined to a few protected areas covering less than 6% of the country.

These elephant exist as island populations surrounded by human settlements and cultivation. Due to increasing pressure from humans and competition for resources the future of wildlife now has to take into account its human inter-relationship. Elephants can and do have catastrophic effects on poor rural communities. Negative interactions include crop raiding, damaging water pipes, cattle sheds, houses and stores. In order for elephant populations to recover, stability and support is crucial for both the rural communities and the future of the protected areas.

The Elephants, Crops and People (ECP) project was formed in 1998 to protect Uganda's last remaining elephant population and to enhance relations between the local community and National Park in the Ishasha Region of the Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP). The project is assisted by Makerere University Institute of Environment and Natural Resources and hosted by the Uganda Wildlife Authority.

The project has been carried out in two phases.

Phase 1: concentrated on the elephant population status and recovery, capacity building and monitoring interaction.

Phase 2: continues Phase 1, but focuses on the surrounding agriculture and settlements.

Through surveys and studies ECP has found that the elephant populations in the Park are recovering in numbers with the population standing at 1,800 elephants, depending on seasonal movements and transmigration between the Democratic Republic of Congo's Parc National des Virunga and Uganda's QENP.

Along with the local communities, ECP are now monitoring crop raiding along the thirty mile Kigezi border. Between May 2001 and March 2002, ECP has recorded and confirmed over 700 crop raiding incidents, thus providing detailed information about the location, seasonality, time and extent of damage, as well as many other variables. The team now comprises of 25 Ugandans, of which two are sponsored Makerere University Masters degree students carrying out their field project through ECP's objectives.