Elucidating Environment Management Intervention Benefits and Underpinning Factors among Uganda’s Albertine Rift Communities

Abstract

Environmental management intervention benefits have been found to depend on beneficiaries’ unique socioeconomic-environmental factors and understanding these helps generate knowledge guidelines for designing, planning and implementation of new interventions. The Ecosystems Alliance (EA) Project in Uganda’s Albertine Rift promoted interventions including, resource access from protected areas, monitoring oil companies’ compliance to set environmental standards, tree planting, lake bank restoration, bee keeping, hay for livestock feeding and cages to shelter communities from crocodiles for four years in Buliisa, Hoima and Kasese district, to, build management capacity of the local communities and institutions to remedy the region’s environment and natural resources which were declining. At the end of the project we interviewed 56 representatives of the project beneficiaries individually and obtained data on benefit level, factors underpinning and perceived livelihoods and environmental impacts of the interventions and used Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS) version 16 (Bryman & Cramer, 2009) to generate percentages (%), correlations with p ≤ 0.05 considered as significant relationship on these. As results, ≥90% of respondents in districts benefited from EA project interventions. Beneficiaries perceived the interventions that enhanced their household incomes and this was especially important for those who were not educated (p = 0.01, for education level); the environment management capacity and this was especially important for women (p = 0.05, for sex) and for households of 4 - 6 members (p = 0.02 with family size); the reduced conflicts with wildlife and this was especially important for households with 4 - 6 members (p = 0.02) and for people who depended on wetlands/wildlife resources (p = 0.00 for both cases) among others. Among constraints to benefit, time of intervention and climatic conditions was especially important among crop farmers (p = 0.04 with occupation) while, intervention not meeting expectation was a factor among beneficiaries in the age group 18 - 31 and 61 - 70 years old (p = 0.01, for age). The respondents recommended future initiatives start with research to determine interventions that match their environment, priority and expectations and these are distributed equitably after prior information/expectation management and technical capacity building.