For years, farmers in Oyam district went to bed not knowing whether they’d wake up to find their gardens flattened or worse. Elephants roaming out of Murchison Falls National Park had become a persistent menace, trampling crops, raiding homesteads, and occasionally killing people. But that story is beginning to change.
The Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) has completed a 15-kilometre electric fence along the park’s boundary, running through Kamdini and Myene Sub Counties, and residents say they can finally breathe.
“Our area is now peaceful,” said Solomon Onapa, a farmer from Bombay Village in Juma Parish, Kamdini Sub County. “The stray elephants no longer come into our homes.”
James Ogwal, the LCIII Chairperson of Myene Sub-County, put it in practical terms: farmers are now harvesting their crops. That might sound ordinary, but for communities that spent seasons watching entire harvests disappear overnight, it is nothing short of transformative.
A solution with roots in Uganda’s conservation history
Electric fencing as a human-wildlife conflict management tool is not new to Uganda. UWA began piloting the approach in the early 2000s, initially around Queen Elizabeth National Park in western Uganda, where communities living along the park boundary faced similar and in some areas, more intense pressure from buffalo, hippos, and elephants. The results were compelling enough that the authority gradually expanded the model to other protected areas across the country.
Today, electric fencing is in use or under active development at several of Uganda’s major national parks, including Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Kibale National Park, Lake Mburo National Park, and Kidepo Valley National Park. At Murchison Falls alone, Uganda’s largest protected area, 126 kilometres of electric fencing have already been installed, according to Wilson Kagoro, the Conservation and Education Officer for the Murchison Falls Conservation Area.
“Electric fencing has proven to be one of the most effective measures we have for controlling human-wildlife conflict,” Kagoro said.
Studies across East Africa have reinforced that view. Research conducted in communities bordering Kibale National Park found that crop raiding dropped significantly in some villages by more than 80 percent following the installation of electric barriers. Similar findings have been documented at Queen Elizabeth, where buffer zone fencing helped reduce retaliatory killings of wildlife by local communities, a secondary benefit conservationists consider just as important.
Why it works and why it matters
The logic behind electric fencing is straightforward: a low-voltage shock discourages animals from crossing the boundary without harming them, while giving farmers on the other side a credible layer of protection. Unlike physical walls or trenches,# which are expensive, difficult to maintain, and often ineffective against determined elephants, electric fences are relatively low-cost, scalable, and easy to repair.
But beyond the mechanics, what makes fencing politically viable is what it signals to communities: that the state takes their losses seriously. Human-wildlife conflict has long been one of the most corrosive forces undermining conservation support in rural Uganda. When an elephant destroys a family’s entire maize crop, the abstract value of biodiversity feels very far away. When a fence stops that from happening, conservation becomes something people have a personal stake in protecting.
UWA acknowledges that electric fencing alone is not a complete answer community engagement, compensation schemes for losses, and alternative livelihoods all remain part of the broader strategy. But as the new fence in Oyam is already showing, sometimes the most meaningful conservation work is the kind that simply lets a farmer sleep at night.
