The impacts of wildlife policies implementation on community livelihoods around mount Elgon national park, Mbale district, eastern region of Uganda.

Abstract

With the implementation of the wildlife policy, people have been displaced but the level of displacement increased with the degazzetment of the park. Access to forest resources was restricted, people lost their grazing land and people were deprived of their farming land and their homes. An initial strict preservation approach was soon substituted by community based participatory approach. The main general objective of the study was to contribute to the knowledge generation about the impacts of the wildlife policy implementation to communities living in surrounding protected areas of Mount Elgon. Secondly to describe how the policy has been implemented. Next objective is to capture the perception of communities about the benefits related to this policy on national park protection, to describe how they affect the livelihoods of people and finally to outline the measures to improve on the livelihoods of this communities and conserving mount Elgon national park. The study was a cross sectional and used both quantitative and qualitative approaches to collect data analyze and present. The methods of data collection used were interviews, questionnaires and field observations. The data was collected from a sample of 60 respondents. The study included the use of statistical packages like Excel, Stata; Min-tab to generate descriptive statistics, Gaussian models and the correlations for testing for the significance of the results. These were from Gewa parish, Bumusiri parish, Bumajila parish and ßukhwana lower in Bufumbo and Bubyangu sub counties respectively. Findings included the better understanding of the impacts of the wildlife policy implementation were it was established that the wildlife policy implementation had the great impact on the local communities with the finding showing that the communities were mostly affected by hunger as most of the communities were much dependent on the national park for their livelihoods, incomes were much affected given the fact that they are agriculturalists diseases in the families, low productivity of crops due to the exhaustion of the small piece of land that the households possess and low productivity of animals due to luck of the pastures due Ito limited access to the national park as this has made the communities to have hard time in managing their families. It was found out that the communities have tried out some strategies to ensure that their livelihoods improve as some are engaged in the business of selling of ripe bananas, selling of grass and working for people as a way of earning some income to sustain their families but the strategies are not appropriate in making these communities be well off. It was found out that so far no measures have been taken by the government towards improvement on these communities’ livelihoods as these communities although have tried to catch up with life by doing some little activities that can earn them some income further research should be done to enhance the findings of the study and their needs the government to include the local community starting from the grass roots before implementation of the policy begins. From the Gaussian linear models both the Gaussian log models and the log modals indicate that the data was significant in explaining the impacts of the wildlife policy implementation wit (P<000) and the coping strategies that the communities have under taken. There was also significant (P<0.05) correlations between the variable explaining the impacts of wildlife policy implementation. Key words: Policy implementation, Conservation refugees, Food security and Food production, Ecosystem services and Ecosystem products, Livelihoods, Conservation, Eviction.