We work in three of ten districts. A map implying otherwise would be the easiest and least honest thing on this website.
District by district
| District | Position | What we do there |
|---|---|---|
| Mbarara | Middle catchment, city | Base at Biharwe. Buffer restoration, three monitoring points, school programme, nursery. |
| Rwampara | Middle catchment | Buffer restoration, two community nurseries, two monitoring points, wetland negotiation. |
| Isingiro | Middle to lower, drier | Rainwater harvesting at schools, one monitoring point, early buffer work. |
| Sheema | Upper catchment | Survey work only. No sites. |
| Bushenyi | Upper tributaries | Survey work only. No sites. |
| Buhweju | Headwaters | Nothing yet. Headwater forest is the highest-value work we are not doing. |
| Ntungamo | Southern tributaries | Nothing. |
| Kiruhura | Rangeland | Nothing. Cattle watering points are a known and unaddressed gap. |
| Lyantonde | Lower catchment | Nothing. |
| Rakai and Kyotera | Final run to Lake Victoria | Nothing. |
Why the middle catchment
Three reasons. Bank pressure is heaviest here, because this is where population density, cultivation and urban demand overlap. It is reachable — a field officer can visit a site and return the same day, which is what makes twelve-month monitoring affordable. And the district structures we work through are strongest here.
Buhweju is where we would go next. Headwater forest protection has the longest-lasting effect of anything in the catchment and the slowest payback, which is exactly the kind of work that struggles to attract funding.
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.
What decides whether a stretch gets worked on
Not need. Need is everywhere on this river and choosing by need alone would spread a small team across two hundred kilometres and achieve nothing measurable at any point on it.
The first test is whether the stretch can be reached and returned to. A site a field officer cannot visit and get back from in a day is a site whose twelve-month count will quietly not happen, and a planting nobody returns to is a number rather than a result. This single constraint explains most of the map above.
The second is whether the households farming the bank will talk. A buffer strip is agreed, not imposed, and where the conversation has not been had the planting fails — we know this precisely because we did it once, at Nyakayojo, and lost the whole cohort within a season.
The third is whether the district office is engaged. We work through district structures rather than around them, and a stretch approved on paper by an office that is not actually involved is a stretch with no one to call when something goes wrong on it.
The gaps we would rather you knew about
Seven of the ten catchment districts have no sites. These are the parts of that we think matter most.
- Buhweju headwaters. Forest protection at the source has the longest-lasting effect of anything in this catchment and the slowest payback, which is exactly the shape of work that struggles to find funding.
- Kiruhura rangeland. Cattle watering points are a known pressure on the river and we have done nothing about them.
- The lower catchment, from Lyantonde to the lake. Everything the middle reaches send downstream arrives here and we have no presence and no readings.
- Sheema and Bushenyi. Surveyed, understood, not worked on.
- Urban discharge in Mbarara City itself. Our monitoring records what arrives at each point; addressing the sources is a regulatory job we have no mandate for.
Questions about the geography
Why not just work at the source?
Because the headwaters are four hours away from where the team is based, and a site that cannot be revisited affordably produces a planting figure and no survival figure. Opening Buhweju means a vehicle, an officer stationed there, and three years of monitoring before anything can honestly be claimed.
Does work in the middle catchment help the lower catchment?
In principle, and we cannot yet demonstrate it. We have six monitoring points and none of them are downstream of the districts we work in, so any claim about downstream benefit would be inference rather than measurement.
Do you work outside the Rwizi catchment?
No. A small organisation that spreads beyond its catchment stops being able to say anything specific about any of it.
Can I suggest a stretch?
Yes, and district environment officers are the people who most often do. The three tests above are what happens next, and the answer is frequently not yet.
Expanding needs unrestricted funding
Opening a district means a vehicle, an officer, and three years of monitoring before anything can be claimed. That is not a grant-shaped expense, which is why members matter.