When the COVID-19 pandemic pummeled global economies in early 2020, Uganda's forests and national parks experienced increased pressure, from things like illegal extraction, as adjacent communities struggled to earn livelihoods. Tourism, which had been a growing sector, suddenly came to a standstill, resulting in reduced funds for conservation activities.

To respond to these threats posed by the pandemic, and also other threats to sustainability and employment in these areas, the Securing Uganda's Natural Resource Base in Protected Areas Project was approved (May 2021). The project is implemented by Uganda's National Forestry Authority (NFA) and the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) and works to both improve the sustainable management of forests and protected areas and to increase the benefits to communities in and around these areas. The project is supported through the World Bank's Uganda Multi Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) with contributions from Sweden and Ireland.

"By supporting this project, we tried to contribute to achieving mainly two different things," says Adam Kahsai-Rudebeck, Sweden's Head of Development Cooperation in Uganda, "to contribute to the reduction of poverty in Uganda and to also support Uganda's contribution to addressing climate change."

"The World Bank has been investing globally in supporting the climate resilience of people and economies," says the Bank's Country Manager for Uganda, R. Mukami Kariuki. "This project speaks directly to all three elements of the World Bank mission to end extreme poverty and increase shared prosperity and to do so on a livable planet."

In Uganda, people's livelihoods depend very much on forests, woodlands, and wetlands, as does the country's tourism sector. Uganda has one of the highest rates of forest loss in the world, and the overall cost of soil erosion and land degradation is estimated at about 17% of the GDP, despite the country's high percentage of arable land. Forest cover has declined by 1.61% every year, on average, between 2010-2020, with the depletion of forests on private land due to wood extraction and small-scale agricultural expansion being main drivers of deforestation. The effect of this is detrimental to people and the habitats of many species of wildlife, including that of gorillas, with negative impacts on tourism and on the long-term GDP.

"Most communities neighboring [Uganda's] protected areas are poor and disadvantaged in terms of market [and] the products they have," says Sam Mwandha, the Executive Director of UWA. To help address this, the project has worked to build the capacity of organized community groups around target protected areas to access and manage protected resources, as well as engage in income-generating activities to improve community livelihoods. It does this through activities such as conservation awareness and prevention of human-wildlife conflict; investment in sustainable forest management; and training and capacity building. Over 6,000 rural Ugandans have benefited from this support.

In order to reduce the amount of wood fuel that people use, the project has provided training and materials for the community groups to build fuel-efficient stoves; to reduce soil degradation and create alternative income opportunities, it has also supported the establishment of community tree nurseries and related training, and trained local ecotourism groups to help strengthen skills in the tourism sector. Job-skilling support and equipment have been provided to members of community groups, targeting women and youth, for tailoring and craft making. This will help build climate resilience and provide communities with income from activities that do not make them reliant on, nor draw heavy resources from, forests and protected areas.

"We also helped others to develop [the] ability to repair and run kiosks for mobile phones. We trained another group in repair and management of motorcycles so that these groups can be a nucleus for development in their own communities," says Mwandha. "And, as they do their activities, the communities learn from them and they improve their livelihoods, but they also look at the importance of wildlife for purposes of their development because the whole training and skilling was intertwined with wildlife management."

"Right now, I [am] able to make a door, and cut, and other things," says Emmanuel Rukundo, a beneficiary of the training on metal fabrication supported by UWA, who was also provided with a welding machine. "At least I am able to get something [income] with this [equipment and training] that they gave me."

Bonnyconcil Kyomuhangi was contracted by NFA to support forest restoration activities. Photo: NFA

The project has also created earning opportunities to communities living close to the target Central Forest Reserves (CFR) through employment in forest restoration. Bonnyconcil Kyomuhangi is transforming her life and the forest through her employment by NFA as a contractor in forest restoration activities in Kasyoha-Kitomi CFR. She says the income from this physical work of strip slashing, planting, and spot weeding, which is usually assigned to men, has enabled her to pay school fees for her three children and even acquire two goats for her family. Kyomuhangi shares a message that conservation begins at home as she urges other women and community members to plant trees, saying, "Start conservation from your homes by growing trees in your compounds and other available spaces."

Chris Kaseka of the Lake Katwe Sub County United Bee Keepers Association shows how he and his community have received important training and support in honey labeling and packaging.Photo: NFA and UWA

Support to beekeeping activities has also provided numerous benefits to the people living in and around forests and protected areas. The provision of beehives is not only creating opportunities for income generation to thousands of Ugandans, but the siting of some beehives in strategic areas is deterring elephants from crossing into people's gardens, preventing human-wildlife conflict.

Chris Kaseka of the Lake Katwe Sub County United Bee Keepers Association (LAKASUBA) says the project's training has been invaluable to their branding and packaging of honey. "You can see that it's the LAKASUBA honey in Ikirongo, from along the Queen Elizabeth National Park," Kaseka says, showing a container of labeled and branded LAKASUBA honey. "We have benefited by [giving] assurance to our customers, and the number of clients who support our bee products have increased because at least when some people come here, they recognize quality."

Tourists are returning to Uganda, with tourism levels expected to rebound to pre-COVID-19 levels by the end of 2024. Protecting Uganda's natural resources, and training and empowering the communities living in and around Uganda's forests and protected areas, will have significant financial impact on the country's GDP, especially as Uganda has just put forward a strategy to grow the tourism sector 25-fold during the period of implementation of its fourth National Development Plan (NDP IV - 2026-2030).

In fact, as the project was commencing, the World Bank report Banking on Protected Areas: Promoting Sustainable Protected Area Tourism to Benefit Local Communities showed that for every dollar governments invest in protected areas and support for nature-based tourism, the economic rate of return is at least six-times the original investment.

Now, three years later, as the Securing Uganda's Natural Resource Base in Protected Areas Project closes, the beneficial impacts on livelihoods and conservation are felt. The project work is being built and expanded upon by the World Bank's larger Investing in Forests and Protected Areas for Climate-Smart Development (IFPA-CD) Project.

Peter Michael Oumo, the Economic Adviser of Ireland's Embassy in Uganda, says that project beneficiaries were able to "gain an understanding and appreciate the importance of preserving natural resources so that they can be utilized for many more generations, rather than just exploiting them and destroying them, as would happen in the absence of this project."

"Our friends have been cutting trees out of ignorance," says Peter Rwomushana, who has been supported with briquette-making training and equipment from UWA. "But we are trying to educate them to make briquettes out of domestic inputs [food waste] without going to the parks to cut trees. That is one of the things we have benefited from, to make sure our community flourishes."

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