Title
Law Enforcement Monitoring: Lessons learned over Fifteen Years in the Albertine Rift Region of Africa
Author(s)
Plumptre, Andrew ;Kujirakwinja, Deo ;Rwetsiba, A ;Wanyama, F ;Tumwesigye, C ; ;Driciru, Margaret ;Muhabwe, R ;Enyel, E ;Kisame, Fred ;Critchlow, Rob ;Beale, Colin
Published
2014
Abstract
Law enforcement activities in protected areas in Africa form a significant proportion of the protected area budgets of a site. Yet there has been little research into measuring the effectiveness of ranger patrols and whether their deployment can be made more efficient. In 1998 the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) worked with a company, Ecological Software Solutions, to develop a software, MIST, that would enable them to monitor their ranger patrols and to record where illegal activities were occurring in Uganda’s protected areas. In 2001 the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) supported UWA to roll out MIST from Murchison Falls National Park, where it had been piloted under a GTZ project of support to the park, to all the other protected areas managed by UWA in Uganda. WCS then took MIST to Rwanda , eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and then further afield including to South East Asia and Latin America. MIST is now used at most CITES/MIKE sites where elephant populations and poaching are monitored. This report summarises how MIST and the more recently developed software SMART have been used to monitor the impacts of law enforcement activities in the Albertine Rift region of Africa (particularly Uganda and eastern DRC) and how this information has been used to improve management and make ranger patrolling more effective. The report also summarises some of the latest developments in the analysis of ranger-collected data which by the nature in which it is collected is biased and clumped in nature. Monitoring information can be collected easily on almost anything but unless it is embedded within a monitoring framework or monitoring plan which specifically links the information collected to how it should be used then it is unlikely that the data collected will be analysed or provide the type of information protected area managers need. In each country in the Albertine Rift where WCS supported the establishment of MIST a process was used to develop such a monitoring framework to help decide what information should be collected, how it should be analysed and who was responsible for each step of the process. This approach is described first here before the results of how MIST data have been used because the authors believe it is critical. Subsequent sections of the report look at ways in which analyses that can be made in MIST and new developments in SMART can be used to improve management of protected areas. There is then a section on ways in which MIST/SMART data can be exported and analysed more fully to provide more statistically robust methods of data analysis. A final section summarises some of the lessons that have been learned over the 15 years of law enforcement monitoring in the region and some of the ways forward that could be adopted in the future.
https://doi.org/10.13140/2.1.4406.5288
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