Uganda

FPP has been working with the Batwa people in Uganda since 2000. The Batwa were eviction from their ancestral land to make way for national parks, and FPP are supporting them to have their rights recognised by the state and their lands returned to them.

Widely regarded as the first inhabitants of the forests of south-west Uganda, the Batwa now exist as a minority ethnic group. They experience ongoing erosion of their cultural, spiritual, and social traditions, along with widespread social, political, and economic marginalization. 

In 1991, two Ugandan National Parks were created for the conservation of mountain gorillas, but this resulted in the eviction of the Batwa from their ancestral territories. To date, the revenues and employment opportunities arising from governmental exploitation of protected areas and tourism activities have not benefited the Batwa.

The Batwa’s customary rights to land have not been recognized in Uganda and they have received little or no compensation for their losses, resulting in a situation where almost half of Batwa remain landless and virtually all live in absolute poverty. 

In 2000, the Batwa formed their own organisation, United Organisation for Batwa Development in Uganda (UOBDU) governed by a board drawn exclusively from members of the Batwa people.

FPP has been working in solidarity with UOBDU ever since then, primarily in support of Batwa efforts to address their exclusion from their ancestral lands from which they were evicted to make way for the Bwindi, Mgahinga and Echuya conservation areas.

FPP’s work with the Mosopisyek

FPP has been working with the Mosopisyek of Benet Indigenous People since November 2013.The Mosopisyek have lived in their moorland and forests on the western slopes of Mount Elgon, Uganda, since time immemorial. Numbering about 12,500 in about 1,600 households, they live in four clusters whose boundaries are rivers.  

The British imposed a public protected area on their ancestral forest land in 1936, and continually restrictions their livelihood activities. The independence government’s 1983 land allocation process discriminated against the Mosopisyek and enabled their more dominant neighbours, the Sabiny, to claim their lands. Their forced eviction from their forest lands followed.

In 1992, the area was made a National Park, and when the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) was created in 1996 it took control of Mt. Elgon National Park. UWA made the moorland out of bounds for settlement, use and grazing. UWA violently evicted the Mosopisyek through impounding cattle, arbitrary arrests, and denying access to crucial resources such as honey and ceremonial sites. Meanwhile the Mosopisyek and local NGOs reported that some UWA officials were colluding with the Sabinys (the dominant ethnic group) in timber logging under the pretext of conserving and protecting the forest. Evictions and violence have continued, and their collective rights to their lands, territories and resources, and their right to freedom from torture and cruel and degrading treatment has been repeatedly violated by the UWA.

Community members continue to maintain a strong connection and reliance on their traditional land and resources in the national park, including for grazing cattle, collecting firewood, medicinal herbs, visiting for prayers or offering sacrifice to their ancestors. This has been met with violent evictions, shooting of community members, including children, by the UWA.

UWA uses a militarized conservation which perpetuates gross human rights abuses and creates the conditions in which logging and poaching by more powerful actors can thrive. FPP has witnessed continuous violations of Mosopisyek rights by UWA since 2012, during which time the Mosopisyek have suffered violent evictions, killings, brutal abuses, and denial of their rights (see for example FPP’s 2015 submission to the ACHPR and its 2022 account of the Mosopisyek protests against UWA human rights violations: Uganda Wildlife Authority station in Kween occupied by Benet community members to protest forcible evictions and abuses of their human rights - Forest Peoples Programme

Since 2022 FPP provided legal and practical support the Mosopisyek community members who have suffered severely at the hands of UWA including from evictions, impounding of cattle and criminalization and also from beatings, rape of a minor, shootings and murder. One example of this violence was on 12 June 2025, when a UWA ranger reportedly shot a young 25 year old Mosopisyek man in the head as he was peacefully grazing his cows on his community’s ancestral lands.UWA does not admit responsibility for this shooting, but it has paid $275 towards his medical costs. This signals UWA’s implicit acceptance that they are responsible and is reflective of the common practice by the UWA to both deny any responsibility for these shootings and yet then to provide some compensation, and in cases where a community member has been killed to pay about $1,000 towards that person’s funeral costs.

At the root of this violence is the UWA’s outdated colonial conservation practice that is discredited throughout the world because it is abusive of human rights and counter-productive in terms of conservation. The Mosopisyek have proactively engaged with and encouraged UWA and other responsible Ugandan government authorities to transition to a model of engagement in which conservation and respect for Indigenous Peoples’ rights are mutually compatible and reinforcing, and in which the Mosopisyek would play an active role in park management in collaboration with UWA on the basis of respect for their internationally recognised traditional and human rights.

Main activities and current work

Alongside UOBDU, our work focuses on:

• Securing land rights
• Education and literacy
• Sustainable livelihoods
• Improved healthcare
• Institutional development
• Exclusionary conservation projects

This work takes multiple different forms, including activities such as:

• Providing a space for discussion
• Developing advocacy strategies
• Supporting government lobbying
• Raising awareness within NGO and donor programmes to include Batwa
• Supporting mapping strategies

Our current work:

• Supporting national level advocacy to increase Batwa targeted policies.
• Promoting the inclusion of youth and elders in intergenerational learning and advocacy spaces
• Helping conservation affected communities to defend and sustain their rights