Combatting Wildlife Crime in Uganda
This project aims to strengthen key Ugandan stakeholders’ capacity to detect, deter and prosecute wildlife crime, working with security and law-enforcement agencies in the country.
Through this five-year project (2020–2025), RUSI is partnered with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) and the Natural Resources Conservation Network (NRCN) to provide research, analysis and expertise to increase the capacity of Ugandan agencies to detect, deter and prosecute wildlife crime.
Project team
Cathy Haenlein
Director of Organised Crime and Policing Studies
Organised Crime and Policing
Chris Goodenough
Programme Manager
Terrorism and Conflict
Tom Keatinge
Director, CFS
Centre for Finance and Security
Mark Williams
Programme Manager | SHOC Network Member - Researcher
Organised Crime and Policing
Neil Bennett, Specialist financial investigator, independent
Aims and objectives
The goal of this project is to reduce wildlife crime in Uganda. The project aims to achieve this by strengthening the capacity of Ugandan agencies to detect, deter and prosecute wildlife crime, working directly with the security and law-enforcement agencies, private sector companies and communities living adjacent to protected areas.
Specifically, RUSI is enhancing the capacity of the Uganda Wildlife Authority and Financial Intelligence Authority to detect and disrupt illicit financial flows linked to wildlife crime through the provision of targeted, tailored on-the-ground mentorship, under the banner of the National Wildlife Crime Coordination Taskforce. The project also supports operationally-focused regional workshops, with the goal of providing targeted support, enhancing cooperation and allowing effective information-sharing and skills transfer.
RUSI helps the project to ‘Think and Work Politically’ by providing an ongoing political economy analysis of how power and resources are distributed and contested in the Ugandan context, and the implications of this for the proposed interventions under the broader USAID programme.
In addition, in 2021, RUSI published a detailed empirical study on the linkages between wildlife crime, money laundering and the financing of terrorism in Uganda.
Project partners
The Wildlife Conservation Society
This project is part of the USAID-funded WCS-led programme ‘Uganda Combatting Wildlife Crime Activity’.
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Project outputs and impact
Review the impact of this project.
United States Agency for International Development (USAID)/Uganda Combating Wildlife Crime (CWC) is a five-year activity (2020 - 2025) implemented by a consortium of partners including Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), Natural Resources Conservation Network (NRCN) and The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
