The project is located in the far north of the Kibale National Park (KNP) in Uganda managed by the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA). The area, located about 20 km from Fort Portal in the Rwenzori foothills, belongs to the Kyenjojo and Kabarole districts, which have 451,600 and 487,600 inhabitants respectively in the 2016 census.
In this region, the 20th century was disastrous for humans, wildlife and forests: this project aims to help restore the balance around this forest area, which was subjected to the ivory trade and then to intense elephant poaching, the eviction of local people for the creation of the KNP and finally the expansion of tea monoculture. Today, cultivated areas and pastures account for 40% of the land in a 5-km strip on the periphery of the park, while forest cover has shrunk and fragmented. The population density is very high and furthermore grew by 300% between 1959 and 1990. The Kiga and Tooro communities living around the park practice subsistence agriculture. Two tea companies share the territory around the park and cover 25% of the land in a 2500m band around the territory of the Sebitoli chimpanzees. The price of tea depends on the quality of the product, which is average in the case of Uganda despite the fact that it is hand-picked and could be valued.
Despite this recent chaotic past, KNP concentrates on its 795 km2 of tropical forest an extraordinary biodiversity and threatened and emblematic species such as chimpanzees and forest and savannah elephants. However, this area is now severely degraded (1) around the park, by agricultural activities that contribute to deforestation, reduce biodiversity and pollute soils and rivers and (2) in the forest, by illegal removal of plant and animal resources from the park, combined with a sense of injustice in the face of a protected area that, according to local residents who have been banned from the forest since 1993, only generates poverty and malnutrition.
Since 2008, the Project for the Conservation of Great Apes (PCGS) and the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) have been studying the chimpanzees and their ecosystem in Sebitoli and, in particular, their responses to human activities under collaborative agreements with UWA. In 2015, the Sebitoli Research and Study Station, managed by PCGS and located in the park, was opened. The Sebitoli Chimpanzee Project (SCP) employs 24 Ugandans from neighbouring villages for conservation actions (census of illegal activities), awareness raising, development projects and human-animal conflict reduction in addition to research activities. The team's studies show that at the edge of the park, elephants, baboons and chimpanzees plunder farmers' fields and gardens on a daily basis. Poverty and malnutrition strongly affect the local communities whose crops are destroyed by these incursions. As a result of human-wildlife conflicts: 1/3 of the chimpanzees have limb amputations, indirect victims of traps set up to capture small game. The situation is tense between the locals and UWA, and actions are very insufficient to protect the fauna and flora of the park (400 traps removed in the 25km2 territory in 1 year, 36% of the 3,000 local residents consume bushmeat, whereas hunting is strictly forbidden in Uganda).
In addition, tea companies and small producers bordering the park use chemical inputs that threaten the health of the users of these territories and the users of these products and are also a source of concern for the forest ecosystem and its wildlife. In this area of the park, 25% of the chimpanzees and many baboons have facial malformations (hare's beak, lack of nostrils), hypopigmentations and lack of reproductive cycles for female chimpanzees. The project will be inspired by the example of COMACO (Wildlife Conservation Society) which has shown the effectiveness of combining conservation of an ecosystem (the Luangwa Valley in Zambia), sustainable agricultural practices with reduced chemical inputs, market access and community development (since 1998, 31 cooperatives involving 61,000 farmers have on average tripled their incomes).
The project focuses on 3 major innovation issues: a global and integrated approach, a transformational approach to local governance and agricultural value chains, and a multidisciplinary action research approach.