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Business
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Written by Devapriyo Das
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Wednesday, 23 September 2009 17:48 |
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Gorillas look set to remain Uganda’s biggest tourist attraction as Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) launches a major fundraising campaign to help conserve the primates. The ‘Friend a Gorilla’ campaign kicks off on September 26 to harness the strength of the social-networking site, Facebook, in an effort to raise money to conserve Uganda’s gorilla families and by extension, increase tourist in-flows.
Via the website www.friendagorilla.org, and through a micro-site on Facebook, the campaign will encourage people to sign up as friends of individual gorillas. Those with Facebook accounts can log in to find photos, behavioural descriptions and updates about members of the five habituated gorilla families in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park.
Friendship, however, will come at a modest price of $1, paid by humans who click on particular gorillas to become their friends. A gorilla can have multiple friends, and humans can have as many gorilla buddies as they like. Global Positioning Systems will be used to plot the movements of gorillas in the park for their online admirers. The site will run for one year.
UWA Public Relations Manager, Lillian Nsubuga, said that the project is about raising support for gorillas, and improving Uganda’s image as a tourist destination.
“We’re expecting that this will help us raise about $100 million. This campaign is going to last one year,” Nsubuga said. While funds will primarily be raised by making friends, Nsubuga said UWA is “selling the idea of corporates and multinationals sponsoring silverbacks (adult male gorillas) at premier figures. We are looking at a silverback being sponsored on the website for $100,000. If you want to sponsor a blackback (young adult male), that’s much less.”
There are six silverbacks up for grabs and sponsoring companies stand to benefit, as their branding will appear on Facebook, which receives millions of daily web hits. A gorilla permit for a foreign tourist costs $500, but guidelines restrict their sale to just eight individuals per day. Assuming 40 permits are sold per day (eight individuals tracking five gorilla families), that translates to $20,000 per day for UWA.
Still, Nsubuga says, “we need Shs700,000 more per ranger to do their work well. The money that we use for operations in Bwindi is not enough.” However, gorilla revenues cannot be re-invested solely in gorilla conservation.
“In April this year we said Shs6 billion comes out of gorilla tourism every year,” Nsubuga said. “We use it to manage wildlife in Uganda generally, in all the parks.”
The benefits of the campaign are likely to spread across Uganda’s tourism sector.
Cam McLeay, Operations Director of Adrift Safaris and Chairman of the Association of Uganda Tour Operators, says that “gorillas are a draw, but we ultimately see 90% of people who buy permits will also undertake an activity outside of gorilla tracking.”
He estimates foreign tourists spend up to ten times as much on other safari activities as they do on tracking gorillas. “The big apes and white water rafting are huge draw-cards,” he said. “But the next most obvious is the chimpanzees, and then the game parks here, which are fantastic and underrated.”
McLeay reveals that a sizeable percentage of permits procured in bulk by safari companies from UWA remain unsold because tourist inflows are seasonal.
INFRASTRUCTURE
However, most permits are likely to be absorbed if the campaign generates more visitors. However, tourism infrastructure will also need to be improved in expectation of higher in-flows.
“The reality is now, we are very short of upcountry accommodation,” says McLeay. “We need to build capacity for our parks.”
About 740 mountain gorillas are thought to exist in the world today, surviving in two patches of tropical rainforest between DR Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, the latter hosting 53% of the total population.
Tracking of habituated gorillas is permitted everyday of the week, but visitors can only spend a total of 60 minutes inside viewing a group. UWA does not plan to increase available permits as that may have environmental and health impacts on the gorillas. The United Nations declared 2009 the Year of the Gorilla in recognition of gorilla conservation efforts.
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