Abstract:
Poaching continue to be reported by Nyungwe National Park Managers as a challenge to its conservation. This work aimed to assess the relationship between poverty and poaching, community proximity to the park and poaching, main actors involved in poaching related activities and to assess perceptions of local communities on the negative impact of poaching to the conservation of Nyungwe National Park. Primary data were collected using a checklist of questionnaire and secondary data collected by reviewing ranger based monitoring (RBM) data from 2013-2017 associated with their socioeconomic data obtained from Districts reports. Data were analyzed using descriptive and analytical statistics and were then processed by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Although the analysis of all arrested poachers from 2013 to September 2017 showed at 68.3% that poachers are poor and confirmed by the findings from our interviewees in this study at 75.7% that poverty is the major factors influencing continuous poaching, poaching should be considered as a complex problem because other factors such as community proximity to the park, cultural related issues, commercial poaching and indirect involvement of females were also assessed. Findings from this study have shown that the more community live to the proximity of the park, the more the probability of being involved in poaching is high as more than 60% of arrested poachers were living less than 2km from the edge of Nyungwe National Park. It was also found that people aged between 18 and 40 years are highly involved in poaching related activities but there was also evidence that females are indirectly involved in poaching. At 41%, communities have demonstrated their level of understanding that poaching has caused animal extinction, continuous decline in animal species and anthropogenic fires, with the impact of reducing tourism revenues in NNP. Local communities have proposed some actions that should be undertaken by park managers to reduce continuous poaching such as providing many temporal jobs to the communities adjacent to the edge of the park.
