For Ugandan farmers, good fences make good neighbors — of elephants

KIKORONGO, Uganda — What do you do if you’re neighbors with an elephant? In western Uganda, the answer is: You build a fence. And not just any fence. One that can deliver a big, powerful zap. At least, if you want your crops to make it to harvest.

A fence like that is just what they have here on the road leading from Kikorongo to Kasese, a small trading city at the foot of the Rwenzori Mountains. It runs alongside a two-lane highway leading south from Kasese toward the Democratic Republic of Congo, about an hour’s drive from here. On one side of the fence, there are small houses and farms with garden plots of yams, beans, potatoes and other crops. On the other, Queen Elizabeth National Park, a 1,978-square-kilometer (768-square-mile) wilderness packed with herds of African elephants, lions, hippos, buffalo and other species.

These are big animals, and they don’t always get along smoothly with their human neighbors. This fence, which delivers a punishing electric shock to anything that touches it, is one of the ways park authorities here are trying to deal with that problem.

“Once an elephant has tested its power, it will never come back,” said Selvest Masereka, an assistant warden with the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), standing proudly next to a stretch of fencing near Kikorongo.

Crop-raiding, primarily by elephants, has become a major issue around Queen Elizabeth in recent years. After decades of poaching, park authorities have done a good job protecting its elephants, and their numbers have been rising. But so has the frequency with which they cross the invisible boundary between the park and its surrounding districts, where hundreds of thousands of people live. Mostly they’re looking for an easy meal — which is exactly what the neat vegetable gardens around Kikorongo look like.

These visits are unwelcome, and dangerous. they can wipe out a farmer’s entire harvest, along with the income they were expecting from it. It’s not easy to chase an elephant off — some are bad-tempered and you can get hurt trying, or worse.

Across Africa, human-wildlife conflicts like this are a growing conservation challenge, especially around protected areas like Queen Elizabeth. Nearly three-quarters of the continent’s governments say they’re a “major or serious concern,” the highest proportion of any world region. Landscapes like Queen Elizabeth look like untouched wilderness in nature documentaries or promotional materials, but they’re often surrounded by human activity. Here, elephants stand so close to the road, they look like they could be hitchhiking, and at night hippos roam in and out of some towns.

When they run into people living in those towns, the consequences can be tragic.

Dealing with these incidents is a big part of UWA’s job. As the agency responsible for managing the park and its wildlife, it has its work cut out. The park isn’t popular with everyone around here. Historically, there have been disputes over who owns the land, and it’s common to hear people gripe that strict rules around access were written without their interests in mind. When wildlife eats up their income or hurts a loved one, it fuels those resentments, and the animals themselves sometimes suffer the backlash.

For as long as our species has existed, we’ve been in relationship with wildlife in some form or another. But as humans have come to dominate the planet, habitats that support large wildlife populations have dwindled in size and been squeezed by economic infrastructure. In these landscapes, working out a healthy relationship between people and animals is critical.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. In some towns around the park, crop-devouring elephants are at the center of human-wildlife conflict. In others, lions or crocodiles are the bigger problem. Queen Elizabeth is also somewhat unusual for a big national park: There are 11 “enclave” towns deep inside its boundaries here, which have their own history and relationship with the wildlife around here.

People in towns like Kikorongo, outside the park, are clamoring for more fencing to be built. But in the enclave towns, many are fiercely opposed to the fences. In those towns, where conservation laws are a source of friction, dealing with human-wildlife conflicts takes a gentle touch.

In others, it takes 9,000 volts.

‘This is no joke’

The idea that there could ever be too many elephants is an eyebrow-raiser for most people, who are used to reading about shrinking wildlife populations and an ivory poaching crisis. But in some parts of Africa, that’s exactly the challenge local authorities are facing.

Overall, the number of elephants on the continent declined by up to 90% between 1964 and 2016. But in some countries, there’s been a turnaround in the last decade or so. The IUCN still lists savanna elephants as endangered, but a combination of falling ivory prices, more effective law enforcement and demand-side crackdowns in East Asia are helping their numbers recover. As they do, in some places they’re bumping up against humans who live near their habitats.

In Kenya, 50 elephants were translocated from the Mwea National Reserve to the Aberdare National Park in 2024 after a glut led to some causing havoc in local villages. And in April 2024, Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi threatened to send 20,000 elephants to Germany over its call to limit the import of hunting trophies.

In an interview with a German newspaper, Masisi said Europeans should “live together with the animals, the way you are trying to tell us to. This is no joke.”

Depending on your point of view, these conflicts are an encouraging problem. At Queen Elizabeth, they’re one indicator that its wildlife is doing relatively well. According to UWA’s figures, the park’s elephant population rose from 400 in 1989 to 4,000 in 2018 (the number is likely close to 5,000 now). Buffalo leapt from 5,000 to 20,000 over the same period.

But farmers who live near the park can be excused for having mixed feelings about this achievement. According to the World Wildlife Fund, in 2013, there were 16 reported cases of human-wildlife conflict. By 2020, there were 862 – the most common being crop-raiding, followed by livestock predation, then injuries caused by wildlife.

“We have faced challenges of animals crossing into people’s communities,” said Edwin Mumbere, an environmental advocate based in Kasese. “They have killed people, especially the elephants. They are the biggest problem.”

Losing money or being injured aren’t the only risks, either. Elephants, it turns out, can wreck homes in another way.

“Because men used to go and guard [their gardens] at night and women remained at home, the women thought the men were lying and hadn’t gone for guarding [against] the elephants, and the men thought the wives who remained at home were bringing men at home to their houses,” said Justus Tsuubira, a human-elephant conflict liaison with Space for Giants.

Queen Elizabeth’s model of conservation is strict, and it falls on UWA to enforce park laws. But that also means the agency takes the blame when wildlife crosses its boundaries or damages people’s property. For this, and other reasons related to its policing responsibilities, the agency is not universally beloved in this region. To build better ties with communities around the park, UWA has “community conservation” rangers whose job is to respond to human-wildlife conflict. But there are only seven of them — too few for a landscape this vast.

To keep elephants out of people’s farms, UWA and its conservation partners have experimented with a number of strategies, including building trenches and financing beekeeping projects. (In addition to the money people can earn from selling honey, elephants have a surprising aversion to bees. Even the sound, piped through speakers, can sometimes scare them off).

But the trenches erode during heavy rains, and braver elephants just bypass the beehives. A few years ago, Space for Giants proposed electric fences as a better, more permanent option.

“When we did the baseline survey in 2020, we found that 95% of the communities were smallholder farmers depending largely on cultivation. We also found that 81% of them were experiencing crop-raiding, mainly by elephants,” Tsuubira said.

Mending fences

The Kikorongo-Kasese fence is a 22.8-kilometer (14.2-mile) stretch that was built as part of this initiative. It’s entirely powered by solar panels, delivering its shock via a pulsing current that ideally gives any animal that touches it a chance to retreat before the next zap comes.

Meter-long (3.3-foot) “porcupine” wires protrude outward from the fence in the direction of the park. These are an engineering response to elephant ingenuity. In some places, elephants have learned that their tusks don’t conduct electricity and can therefore be used to snap the wires. They are very smart animals.

UWA’s Masereka says building the fences is one of the most popular things the agency and its partners have ever done for people around here.

“They don’t have to worry that their crops will be destroyed by wild animals. No more having to pay money for people to guard [them].”

Masereka’s claim is backed up by data that Space for Giants gathered in a survey to assess the fence’s effectiveness. In the area where the first stretch was built, just under 90% of respondents said crop-raiding had ended. Around half said it had been so effective that their view of elephants had shifted from negative to positive as a result.

“In some communities, they were saying that you can now even increase the presence of elephants in the park; we love these animals, the only problem that we’ve had with them is they’re affecting our livelihoods,” Tsuubira said. “The attitude of the communities towards the animals in the park is related to the conflicts they face with them.”

The survey results are echoed in media reports that quote farmers singing the fence’s praises. Where it’s been promised but not yet built, people are even offering to work for free to get it up and running. In some areas, land now protected by fencing has doubled in value.

These fences are proving to be an effective way to manage human-wildlife conflict, but they’re not cheap. Space for Giants told Mongabay the first stretch cost between $8,000 and $10,000 per kilometer to build. Once UWA took over the project and implemented its own procurement process for labor and materials, the cost rose to as much as $15,000. So far, more than 65 km (40 mi) have been built in hotspots around Queen Elizabeth, and the agency has plans to roughly double that, with the World Bank and E.U. helping foot the bill.

The style of conservation practiced at Queen Elizabeth is often derogatorily called “fines and fences.” But for farmers who live near the park, the latter, at least, is very popular.

It’s not a universal sentiment, though. Deeper inside the park, there are different conflicts, and they’re not all with its wildlife. Some are simmering between enclave towns and the Ugandan government, with roots that stretch back into Queen Elizabeth’s history. The park’s big predators, caught in the middle, have become collateral damage. Protecting them might mean mending fences, not building new ones.

Killing the kings

Queen Elizabeth’s lions are one of its biggest tourist attractions. This is one of only two places on the planet where the big cats climb trees. Biologists don’t have a consensus on where the behavior comes from; theories range from prey-spotting to avoiding biting flies, but the sight of a lioness napping on a tree branch is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

Stars of the park, these lions are also one of the few mammals it’s at risk of losing right now. And human-wildlife conflict is to blame.

In 2014, there were 493 lions in Uganda, according to its ministry of tourism and wildlife. In March 2024, the ministry said that there were at that point only 275, a 45% decline in just 20 years. Estimates of how many lions there are in Queen Elizabeth now range from 40-50, far fewer than the park once had.

The primary reason for this, according to Ugandan Tourism Minister Tom Butime, is “retaliatory killings resulting from human-wildlife conflicts.” Angry over losing cattle to predatory attacks, in some parts of Queen Elizabeth there have been incidents in which frustrated herders have poisoned lions.

There are disputes over how many have been killed. According to Butime, 26 lions were poisoned in three cases between 2018 and 2022. Ludwig Siefert, a wildlife veterinarian who heads the Uganda Carnivore Program, a conservation NGO that works in Queen Elizabeth, told Mongabay in a text that he thought the number was closer to 10.

Either way, it’s too many.

These poisonings have sparked fury both inside and outside Uganda. Understanding why they’re happening requires some familiarity with the park’s history.

The 11 “enclave” towns inside Queen Elizabeth are mostly inhabited by Basongora people, who are largely descended from the original inhabitants of this landscape. Pastoralists who were known for cattle-keeping, the Basangora were forcibly resettled when the park was established by British colonial authorities, pushed into fishing and barred from grazing their herds outside of small areas. Many see this as a lingering injustice yet to be addressed. Conflicts between the Basangora and park authorities have been plentiful, and UWA considers the enclave towns to be a thorn in its side.

The park’s lions have been caught in this conflict.

“The pastoralists believe this is their land and they have the right to graze their cattle here,” said Kenneth Mugyenyi, an administrator with the Uganda Carnivore Program. “They’ll say, ‘You stop us from grazing our cattle, but then the wildlife comes to eat it.’”

Hamakungu, a fishing village at the mouth of Lake George, is one of Queen Elizabeth’s enclave communities. Over the decades, its population has grown. UWA grudgingly tolerates cattle here, but their owners aren’t supposed to bring them into the park. In their search for forage and water, they often do so anyway.

This is one reason why UWA is now threatening to evict them to a new location outside the park. These threats have not gone over well in Hamakungu and the other enclaves.

“The problem we have is with the management, which is more for wild animals than human beings, who are also part of the ecosystem of the park,” said Wilson Asiimwe, a local politician who represents Hamakungu.

UWA doesn’t appreciate Hamakungu’s cattle herds, but the park’s lions love them. A cow is a much easier meal than an aggressive buffalo or speedy antelope, and the big cats know it. At night, the herds are kept in kraals — makeshift enclosures constructed from papyrus reeds that have proven effective in stopping lions or leopards. But during the day, when they’re grazing in approved areas, or illegally inside the park, the predators pounce.

These lion attacks can be a huge financial hit to their owners, who are already barely scraping by. A small handful have reacted badly, retaliating against the cats by poisoning them as retribution.

“Some of these pastoralists are so pissed and angry, even when they know they might get [compensation] from an NGO or UWA, they go ahead and poison, because they feel that these carnivores are restricting their way of life,” said Emmanuel Akampurira, a conservation biologist with the Uganda Wildlife Research and Training Institute.

Paying for peace

Compensation, for victims of elephant-raiding as well as lion attacks, is a recent addition to the tool kit park authorities have for mediating human-wildlife conflicts. In 2019, Uganda passed a new “Wildlife Act,” which includes a process for making payments to those who lose property or are injured by wild animals. The rules were formalized in 2022.

In practice, though, the process is nearly impossible for most people to see through to the end. It requires a police report and a site visit by UWA, then a debate over payment between government agencies. According to a report by WWF, most people have concluded that it’s a waste of time and energy. Between 2018 and 2022, only two out of 103 compensation claims submitted around Queen Elizabeth were for attacks on livestock.

As an enclave town, Hamakungu isn’t even technically covered under the compensation law. People here see that as another manifestation of their mistreatment by wildlife authorities.

“[The lions] could eat your animals, you could be killed by a buffalo or hippo, and no compensation,” Asiimwe said. “It was for your family to suffer.”

At the moment, keeping the peace between lions and herders in Hamakungu falls to the Uganda Carnivore Program, which runs its own private compensation scheme. But the small NGO doesn’t have enough cash to pay the full value of livestock that’s killed, so herders don’t always walk away happy.

“They try to reach what they think is a middle ground that’s fair,” Akampurira said. “That’s what angers the pastoralists. They say if this lion had not killed their cow, it was probably going to get pregnant and produce.”

Grumbling aside, these payments may be the only thing keeping Queen Elizabeth’s lions from disappearing entirely.

“It’s helping part of the problem,” said Mugyenyi of the Uganda Carnivore Program. “If I’m honest, if it wasn’t for this program that we started, maybe we wouldn’t be having any lions in the park.”

Short of the mass evictions that UWA has floated, one solution could be to bring the electric fencing that’s so popular at the park’s edges into Hamakungu, surrounding it so lions can’t get to the town’s cattle. But pastoralists here don’t want that. A fence would cement the hard line between their herds and Queen Elizabeth’s grasslands, adding an air of finality to the Basangora’s exclusion from them.

“You need to balance conservation and the welfare of animals with the communities,” Mugyenyi said. “Personally, I believe in the bottom-up approach. You need these Indigenous people in conservation because they’re the people who live with these lions. They face the challenges, so it’s better if you engage them.”

A middle ground?

Despite these tensions, people in Hamakungu and other enclave towns are generally quick to say they have a deep respect for the park’s wildlife. The poisonings aren’t born from any inherent hostility to lions; they’re entwined with a wider history of grievances around conservation policy that plays out around the park.

“Most people living in these enclaves are friendly to the wild animals, especially the lions,” Mugyenyi said. “They have lived with them for years.”

Conflicts between people and wildlife here are real, but there are also deep cultural bonds between the two, rooted in traditions that predate the park’s existence. In this part of Uganda, people often have “totems” — animals that represent their clan and ancestry. According to old customs, they’re prohibited from harming those animals.

“People have been here, dating back to around 1300, interacting with animals,” said Nicholas Kakongo, a tour guide based in Katwe, another enclave. “Most of the clans around there and ethnic tribes have been directly attached with wild animals. Some of us use them as our totems. For example, my totem is a vervet monkey.”

The default posture of many national parks like Queen Elizabeth in Africa is to create hard boundaries between nature and people. There’s a long history here, and proponents of this model say it’s necessary to keep the two apart to protect the few intact habitats wildlife have left. In towns like Kikorongo, where a fence is a symbol of safety and relief, this approach has its supporters. But some of the enclaves hint at other possibilities.

Katwe, another enclave town, is about an hour’s drive west from Hamakungu, not far from the the DRC and its famed Virunga National Park. Here, wildlife regularly wanders in and out of town. On the banks of Lake Edward, hippos bask in the sun just meters away from men washing their cars. They can be territorial, dangerous animals, but people in Katwe say they know they don’t have anything to fear from the town’s residents, so for the most part they’re unfazed by the closeness.

It’s a surprising sight for outsiders. But in Katwe, this is just part of life.

It’s not all rosy here. Starting in the 1990s, crocodiles mysteriously appeared in this part of Uganda, and they’ve since become a dangerous menace, regularly attacking and killing people in Katwe, Hamakungu and other towns. (In a symbol of how deep the mistrust between park authorities and the enclave towns runs, there’s a conspiracy theory here that they were intentionally introduced to chase people away).

UWA has made no secret of the fact that it wants Katwe and the other enclaves gone. But Kakongo said the towns are proof that conservation doesn’t have to pit wildlife and people against each other. Despite the challenges, the two can still coexist.

“You see these animals that are in the lake. At night, the hippos graze within the community. The elephants come here. The hyenas come here. We’ve learned to stay in the same community without harming each other,” he said.

Getting the balance right, here and in other wild landscapes, is one of the big challenges for conservation in Africa. For some people, the answer might look like an electric fence. For others, it could be something they’ve never really had: a seat at the table.

“My prayer is the administration should be friendly to the people and know they are also human beings,” Asiimwe said. “We are all conserving for future generations, both we the community and them. They cannot do conservation alone.”

Banner image : An elephant in Queen Elizabeth National Park. Photo by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.

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