20 years of conservation in Uganda
Posted 14 Jul 2025
This year we’re excited to be celebrating the 20th anniversary of our support to the Budongo Conservation Field Station (BCFS) in Uganda. A new report examining the impact of these two decades of partnership shines a light on the incredible work that can result from long-term support to conservation programmes.
BCFS is a small organisation with a massive impact, working to protect the Budongo forest, the largest rainforest in East Africa, home to thousands of species.
Ancient giants
Tropical rainforests are one of the planet’s most important ecosystems, absorbing a huge amount of carbon from the atmosphere, but this key habitat is being lost at an ever-increasing rate. Budongo forest is unusual among rainforests as, thanks to the tireless protective efforts of BCFS staff, it is still possible to find vast, mature mahogany trees that have all but disappeared from many other forests. As well as absorbing carbon, these huge relics themselves support a great diversity of life.
Big wins for chimpanzees
Chimpanzees are dangerously close to extinction, facing threats including catastrophic injuries from snares.
Over the 20 years of our partnership, the hard-working primate team at BCFS have helped to boost numbers of chimpanzees in Budongo forest to 800 individuals. The amazing snare patrol team have removed a jaw-dropping 54,826 wire snares!
Hunter: no more!
As well as removing snares, BCFS are tackling the problem at the source with their goat alternative livelihood scheme. Under this programme, staff engage with hunters, encouraging them to agree to give up hunting in exchange for two goats, enabling them to take up goat rearing instead. This has been incredibly successful, with 172 hunters participating in the scheme! Results have been beyond what the team hoped for, with some hunters (like Moses, second from the left below) even agreeing to join the BCFS snare patrol and using their specialist knowledge to help remove snares from the forest.
Community champions
Conservation can’t be successful without the engagement of communities, a key aspect of the work of BCFS. Most of the households local to the forest experience frequent food insecurity and are vulnerable to crop raiding by primates. BCFS works in many of these villages, offering people opportunities to be trained in different skills and providing them with the means to grow crops that are less attractive to wildlife.
The BCFS vet team also provides villages with veterinary support; they have treated 6,893 goats and other livestock from 2,018 households so far. Keeping these animals healthy maintains the success of the goat scheme, reducing the likelihood that people might instead hunt in Budongo forest.
A partnership for the long-term
We’re so proud to have supported BCFS’s important work for so long and plan to continue doing so into the future.
BCFS may be small, but their work is mighty, with these highlights barely skimming the surface of everything they have achieved for conservation and local communities.
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