For decades, River Rwizi has been the lifeline of southwestern Uganda, watering crops, feeding livestock and supplying drinking water to Mbarara City and towns across a dozen districts. Today, it is also one of the country’s most visible case studies in what happens when a river’s wetlands are eaten away, one plot at a time.
This week, the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), working with the Ministry of Water and Environment and Ntungamo Municipal Council, moved excavators into Kakingora Wetland, a roughly 70-hectare wetland system feeding the Rwizi catchment, to tear out illegal structures, close artificial drainage channels, and begin restoring around 25 hectares of degraded swamp.
A River on Life Support
River Rwizi’s decline has been documented for years, and the numbers are stark. A NEMA senior environment officer in Mbarara has estimated that about 60 per cent of the Rwizi catchment has been degraded, cutting the water volumes the river depends on. A regional NEMA manager separately noted that of the roughly half of catchment wetlands classified as degraded, restoration efforts had reached less than 5 per cent recovery a sobering reminder of how far behind the river’s champions are running.
Field visits to wetland sites along the river’s course have found that in several locations, wetland systems have effectively been swallowed by farmland, drained for crop and livestock production. Officials point to a mix of sand mining, plastic dumping, wetland encroachment, and farming in the river’s buffer zones as the drivers behind its shrinking flow. The river itself originates in the hills of Buhweju District and threads through eleven more districts before its water reaches communities as far as Kyotera, meaning damage upstream in places like Ntungamo ripples downstream for hundreds of kilometres.
Kakingora: The Latest Front Line
Kakingora wetland runs through the sub-counties of Rweikiniro, Nyarutuntu, Ntungamo and Itojo, and neighbours Nyaruteme wetland, which itself feeds water into River Rwizi making its degradation a direct threat to the river’s headwaters. The scale of encroachment has been significant. NEMA identified 32 encroachers in the wetland and served 28 of them with restoration orders before authorities moved to enforce evictions.
This week’s operation was not a quiet one. Officials used an excavator to demolish houses, garages and shelters and to fill in trenches dug into the wetland, while casual labourers cleared crops and invasive tree species. The exercise, which started near Kyamate Bridge, is expected to push on toward Kahunge and later into Itojo Sub- County as NEMA works through the wider wetland system.
NEMA officials say the demolitions followed years of warnings that went unheeded. A senior wetland inspector explained that encroachers had been given eviction notices as far back as September 2024 with a 21-day ultimatum, followed by renewed vacation letters in 2025, yet instead of leaving, new occupants kept moving in.
The Human Toll
Restoration has come at a real cost to livelihoods. The crackdown has displaced residents, traders, mechanics and students, disrupting homes, businesses, gardens and even a vocational training institution that offered courses in tailoring, hairdressing and mechanics. At Kyamate, an entire street of mechanic garages was cleared, with workers who said they had only recently relocated there after being evicted from other streets during a separate trade enforcement drive.
Some of those affected argue they were misled by the very authorities now clearing them out. One mechanic whose garage was demolished said local leaders had directed traders to the site after earlier evictions, only for officials to later claim no one held legitimate plots there. Local leaders acknowledge the tangle of responsibility: Ntungamo’s mayor has conceded that regulating encroachers is difficult partly because wetland boundaries are unclear and, pointedly, that the municipal council itself contributed to the damage by building a road through the gazetted wetland in 2019, a project that opened the door to further settlement along the roadside.
For residents, the wetland’s loss has not been abstract. Ntungamo town has suffered repeated flooding, which residents and conservationists attribute to the depleted Kakingora wetland, which once functioned as a natural reservoir and green belt absorbing excess rainwater.
A Pattern Across the Catchment
Kakingora is only the latest chapter in a much longer campaign. Restoration efforts elsewhere in the Rwizi catchment have tried gentler approaches alongside enforcement. In Kakigaani, a Nile Breweries–backed initiative gave affected households heifers as an alternative income source, encouraging voluntary departure from the river’s buffer zone, with the cattle providing milk and manure for fertiliser to offset lost farmland.
Elsewhere, recovery has shown real, if partial, progress. Officials say wetlands such as Nyakambu and Kashasha have been substantially restored, with recovery estimated at around 75 per cent, while newer efforts at Bujaga wetland were only around 30 per cent recovered. Non-governmental partners have joined the effort too: a program covering micro-catchments including Kakondo, Ihoho, Kongoro, Nyakaikara, Kibaare /Nyamukana and Bujaga across four districts has been running since September 2021.
Money or the lack of it, remains the binding constraint. A regional NEMA manager pointed to chronic underfunding as the biggest obstacle to scaling up restoration, noting that every wetland intervention requires its own funding proposal, and that private partners have had to fill gaps left by limited government resources.
Staffing is stretched thin as well: NEMA’s own southwestern regional officer has said his office is responsible for enforcement across roughly 30 districts with too few personnel to match the mandate, and has called on district-level environmental officers to take greater ownership of apprehending encroachers in their own areas.
Why It Matters
Wetlands like Kakingora aren’t just scenery they are the sponges and filters that keep rivers like the Rwizi alive. When they’re drained for crops, brick-making, or settlement, rainfall runs off instead of recharging groundwater, rivers silt up and shrink, and towns downstream lose both flood protection and dry-season water supply. Legal experts and conservationists frequently describe wetland restoration in Uganda as a race against time: buffer zones and swamps take years to regenerate but only days to destroy.
NEMA’s approach sensitisation first, then enforcement reflects an attempt to balance conservation urgency against the livelihoods of often-poor communities who, in many cases, were themselves encouraged or permitted to settle on protected land by local leadership. That tension, visible starkly in Ntungamo this week, is likely to recur as the Kakingora operation pushes further into Kahunge and Itojo, and as similar restoration drives continue across the Rwizi catchment’s other degraded wetlands.
For now, the fate of the river and of the thousands who depend on it for water, food and livelihood hinges on whether Uganda’s environmental authorities can restore faster than encroachment can return.