The Uganda Conservation Foundation- which is the number one conservation NGO within Uganda together with Space for Giants made have funded and a legal training exercise for a number of staff members working with the Uganda Wildlife Authority. For the start they have started with five members.
Currently the Uganda Wildlife had only ten (10) in-house prosecutors that had undergone proper training and without a doubt the authority was unhappily understaffed in terms of that department especially as cases were increasing in number while the few prosecutors were struggling to see that they process each of them through the trial process up to conviction.
These five people who have been chosen are going to undergo a full sponsored one year training for a diploma at the Uganda Law Development Centre and after the successful completion of this diploma program, they will be legal prosecutors.
In addition, some of the information we are receiving from the authority has revealed that of the ten (10) current prosecutors within the authority, three (3) of them have been chosen to do courses in line with Master Degrees in Law as well as Post Graduate Law-Diplomas to offer them more training before they report back to their duty stations.
This has come after the successful groundbreaking scholarships for other staff members at the Uganda Wildlife Authority not so long ago, a number of whom finished their Diplomas in Law while two others are at the moment attending courses within the Netherlands in Crime Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.
Although commercial poaching of wildlife for ivory generally is rare in Uganda, subsistence poaching as well as trade for wild animals’ meat have increased over the past few years, and this has kept the law enforcement squads under the Uganda Wildlife Authority very busy and alert to prevent any further increase in any of these illegal practices that would subsequent reduce the number of these wild animals within Uganda’s national parks and wildlife reserves.
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