Governance Structure

The Task Force is headed by the Executive Director of the Uganda Wildlife Authority, who chairs its top-level coordination and answers to the Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities for the Task Force's performance.

Day-to-day technical work is steered by a Technical Committee co-chaired by the Uganda Wildlife Authority and the Ministry of Water and Environment — pairing the wildlife and forestry mandates that together cover the full spectrum of wildlife and forest crime.

A Secretariat hosted at the Uganda Wildlife Authority services the Task Force: convening the quarterly coordination meetings (ten held to date), maintaining records, tracking resolutions and coordinating joint activities between meetings.

Each of the thirteen (13) member law-enforcement agencies designates focal persons who are the working nerves of the Task Force. Focal persons share intelligence, activate their institutions during joint operations, and carry Task Force resolutions back into their agencies.

The Task Force operates under adopted Standard Operating Procedures and Terms of Reference that define how cases are referred between institutions, how joint operations are authorised, and how information is protected. Following the 2025 Bugoma resolutions, membership expansion is under consideration to bring in the Attorney General's Chambers, the Ministry of Lands and the Judiciary.

Wildlife and forest crime devastates our natural heritage, robs our communities of the tourism revenues that fund schools and health centres, finances wider criminality, and steals from generations of Ugandans yet unborn. When an elephant falls to a poacher or a forest falls to an encroacher, the loss is not the poacher's alone to answer for — it belongs to all of us. That is why, in 2018, the Government of Uganda brought its law-enforcement agencies together into a single National Wildlife Crime Coordination Task Force: because no single institution, however capable, can defeat organised wildlife crime alone.

The results in this report — the seizures intercepted, the traffickers convicted, the joint operations mounted, the nine regional workshops held and the quarterly coordination that now runs like clockwork — are the fruit of that collaboration. I am deeply grateful to our partners: the Wildlife Conservation Society and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for their steadfast technical support, and the European Union and the Government of Denmark, whose generous funding has carried this work forward. I also thank every focal person in our member institutions, whose quiet diligence turns coordination on paper into arrests, prosecutions and protected forests on the ground.

The Uganda Wildlife Authority, under the guidance of the Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, will leave no stone unturned in the fight against wildlife and forest crime. To the traffickers, our message is simple: Uganda is closed to you. To the public, our door — and our reporting channels — are always open. Together, we are Conserving for Generations.