Mandate, Mission & Objectives

The mission of the Task Force is to promote law-enforcement institutional collaboration and effective cross-border control of illegal wildlife trade through shared information and intelligence, joint operations and prosecutions, and public awareness.

The Task Force pursues six objectives:

• Strategic cooperation — building lasting strategic cooperation among the institutions responsible for combating wildlife and forest crime;
• Operational links — establishing practical operational links among member institutions so cases move seamlessly from detection to prosecution;
• Intelligence sharing — enabling the timely sharing of information and intelligence on wildlife crime networks;
• Joint operations and prosecutions — coordinating joint enforcement operations and supporting effective prosecution of offenders;
• Public awareness — raising public awareness of wildlife and forest crime, its costs, and how to report it;
• Regional and global networks — connecting Uganda's response to regional and international enforcement networks, including Interpol, the Lusaka Agreement Task Force and CITES structures.

In practice this means one thing: when wildlife crime occurs anywhere in Uganda — a snare line in a national park, a container of scales at the airport, a chainsaw crew in a forest reserve — the full weight of the thirteen (13) member law-enforcement agencies can be brought to bear on it through a single coordination mechanism.