A catchment does not respect a district boundary. Water that falls on a hillside in Buhweju is drunk in Mbarara and reaches Lake Victoria through Rakai.
The map below is projected from coordinates rather than sketched. The river rises in the Buhweju hills at the north-west, runs south-east past Mbarara, then through Lake Mburo, Lake Kachera and Lake Kijanebalola before reaching Lake Victoria. Tributaries come off the Nkore hills to the south and the rangeland to the north.
Drag it, zoom it, and select any marker to see what is there and go to it. District seats, towns and lakes sit at their published coordinates; the river's course is traced at catchment scale rather than surveyed, and any site placed to the nearest bend rather than to a GPS fix says so. For authoritative spatial data the Ministry of Water and Environment's catchment management plans are the source, and we link to them in the research library.
90 km and 666 m of fall, from 1,800 m in the Buhweju hills to 1,134 m at Lake Victoria. Elevations are the published figures for these places, not a surveyed bed profile.
Away from the river
Where we actually work
Three of the ten districts in the catchment have programmes running. The rest are part of the same watershed and carry none of our work.
- Buhweju
- Bushenyi
- Sheema
- Ntungamo
- Mbarara
- Rwampara
- Isingiro
- Kiruhura
- Lyantonde
- Rakai and Kyotera
The full explorer has the terrain, the 3D model and the downloadable data. It is built for a larger screen.
Why work across a whole basin?
What happens upstream does not stay upstream
A hillside cleared forty kilometres away decides what the water looks like at Mbarara. Four steps, every one of them ordinary, and not one of them stopped by a district boundary.
- 01Upstream
Vegetation is cleared
Headwater slopes that used to hold forest are farmed or cut for poles. Nothing is rooted where the rain lands first.
- 02On the slope
Soil moves
With no root structure, heavy rain lifts topsoil off the hillside instead of soaking into it. The farmer loses the field slowly.
- 03In the channel
Sediment arrives
That soil ends up in the river. The bed rises, the channel widens, and the banks it undercuts were stable before.
- 04Downstream
The water changes
Turbidity rises, treatment costs more, and the wetlands that would have filtered it have been drained for cultivation.
Each step is documented on the threats page with its source. The chain is why a buffer strip planted at Rwentondo is measured against a control stretch upstream rather than against nothing.
From map to measurement
What we are measuring along the river
Six fixed points, sampled quarterly. One of them is a control stretch we deliberately never restored, because a number with nothing to compare it against is not a result.
- RW-04restored
62NTU
8 lower than a year ago
Downstream of our earliest buffer planting.
2026 Q2 · Rwampara
- RW-05control
88NTU
1 lower than a year ago
Control stretch — deliberately not restored.
2026 Q2 · Rwampara
- RW-02urban
131NTU
25 higher than a year ago
Katete bridge, mid-city.
2026 Q2 · Mbarara
Turbidity in nephelometric units; lower is better. Last updated 2026-06-30. Flagged as sample data until the organisation's field records are loaded through the admin — the charts carry the same flag rather than hiding it.
The ten districts
| District | Position in the catchment | Our presence |
|---|---|---|
| Buhweju | Headwaters | None yet — headwater forest work is a future priority |
| Sheema | Upper catchment | Survey work only |
| Bushenyi | Upper tributaries | Survey work only |
| Ntungamo | Southern tributaries | None |
| Mbarara | Middle catchment, city | Base at Biharwe; heaviest activity |
| Rwampara | Middle catchment | Buffer planting and two nurseries |
| Isingiro | Middle to lower | Rainwater harvesting focus |
| Kiruhura | Rangeland | None — cattle watering points are a known gap |
| Lyantonde | Lower catchment | None |
| Rakai and Kyotera | Final run to Lake Victoria | None |
An honest note about coverage
We work in three of ten districts. Presenting a catchment-wide map alongside a catchment-wide claim would be misleading, so the table above says plainly where we are and are not.
An interactive map is coming
A full interactive version with project pins and monitoring points is in development. It will ship with a text and table alternative, because a map that only works visually is not accessible to everyone.