Sundays respectively.^93 Issues that have been discussed at village meetings (often at the
request of villagers) have included methods, locations and species for tree-planting,
problems of crop-raiding by chimpanzees and other species, requests for live-traps,
requests for seeds to plant and polythene pots to grow seedlings in, and help with
vermin control. Several objectives have been achieved, e.g. a group of farmers in
Bwinamira III village has established a woodlot of Eucalyptus with 100 stems; farmers
in Owini village raised and sold over 700 Eucalyptus seedlings and now plan to grow
Musizi (Maesopsis). At schools, issues discussed have included requests to visit the
BFP and the forest itself, Murchison Falls National Park and the Uganda Wildlife
Education Centre at Entebbe.
Geresomu Muhumuza, one of our most senior field assistants at BFP, wrote a disser-
tation on conservation education while studying at the Nyabyeya Forestry College
(Muhumuza 2002); what follows is taken from his work. He interviewed 118 individu-
als living in six villages in Budongo sub-county. The majority of his informants were
aged between 31 and 50 years: 59% had received primary education only, 17% had gone
on to secondary or even in a few cases tertiary education; 81% were subsistence
farmers; 5% were professionals; 9% were jobless.
Of these people, 59% had received conservation education from the BFP’s
programme. Of the 41% remaining, Muhumuza writes that they were mostly ‘women
who never turn up for community meetings’. Indeed, he continues ‘The great and most
depressing constraint in conservation is not habitat loss or over exploitation but the
human indifference to socio-cultural problems’ (p. 12).
The topics mentioned by respondents as ones from which they had learned new
information from or benefited from the BFP’s Conservation Education Programme are
given in Table 12.4.
Clearly there is a long way to go, but a good start has been made with our emphasis
on the need for tree-planting (we have also distributed seeds and seedlings, and referred
them to Nyabyeya College nursery for tree seedlings and to BUCODO,^94 who have
established tree nurseries in some villages). Of the 51 who expressed an interest, 12 had
actually planted trees.^95 The interest in bee-keeping relates back to our Farmers’
232 The future of Budongo’s chimpanzees
Table 12.4: Conservation topics mentioned by
respondents (from Muhumuza 2002).
Topic Respondents (N118)
Protection of wildlife 6
Forest conservation 5
Tree-planting 51
Bee-keeping 5
Tree nursery 2(^93) We are grateful to Oakland Zoo and JGI-Uganda for making funds available for this programme.
(^94) Budongo Community Development Organization.
(^95) Tree-planting is encouraged by Masindi District under Ordinance 2, Part VI, Section 30 (1), 2002, which
states: ‘Every land owner or land user shall plant trees on at least 10% of his or her land.’