Questions About Our Work

Conservation Village is a Ugandan wildlife conservation organisation working across many landscapes throughout Uganda, including mountain gorilla health surveillance in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and pangolin rescue and anti-trafficking work in the Budongo–Mukihani forest corridor, and continuing to grow into others. It combines veterinary medicine, One Health disease surveillance and its Conservation Wealth Uganda livelihood programme to protect wildlife and the communities living beside it.

One Health treats the health of wildlife, livestock, people and the shared environment as a single system. In practice this means monitoring wildlife parasite burdens, deworming and vaccinating community livestock, and protecting shared water sources, because a disease risk in any one of those places moves quickly into the others. It is a principle Conservation Village applies across every landscape we work in, from Bwindi to Budongo and beyond.

Conservation Wealth Uganda is Conservation Village’s poverty-graduation programme. Forest-edge households and former hunters, who might otherwise poach out of economic need, receive livestock (goats, pigs or sheep) as a starting productive asset, run as a closed-loop system with crops and savings groups. One Health veterinary support keeps the animals alive, since a family that loses its livestock to preventable disease has little left to lose by returning to poaching.

Because at every landscape where we work, the primary threat to wildlife originates in poverty at the forest boundary. A household with no reliable income has strong incentive to poach or extract forest resources; a household with a productive, healthy livestock asset does not. Early community-sensitisation-only efforts did not change hunting behaviour on their own, but pairing them with livelihood and veterinary support did.

Beyond treating sick or injured animals, the role is largely preventive and investigative: monitoring the health of wild populations, collecting and analysing diagnostic samples without disturbing the animals, tracking disease trends over time, and identifying the routes by which pathogens move between wildlife, livestock and people.

Sedating a wild gorilla carries real clinical risk and disrupts group behaviour. Faecal sampling gathers parasitological data (species present, egg burdens, trends over time) with no contact and no stress to the animal, making routine, repeated surveillance possible.

Conservation Village welcomes research collaborations, grant partnerships, conservation consultations, academic lectures and community project support. Reach us at info@conservationvillage.org or via WhatsApp on +256 752 518 402.