Rwanda’s Conservation Story — A National Parks Turnaround
The Rwanda that receives gorilla trekking visitors today — the managed park, the regulated permits, the luxury lodge infrastructure around Volcanoes National Park — was built in remarkable circumstances. In 1994, Rwanda’s national parks were in a state that any objective assessment would have described as irreparable. The genocide of that year killed nearly 800,000 Rwandans in 100 days. In the immediate aftermath, refugee camps housing over a million people were established at the boundaries of Akagera National Park and Volcanoes National Park; Akagera was settled by returning refugees and its wildlife reduced from sustainable populations to near-elimination. Even Volcanoes National Park — the gorilla sanctuary — was cleared in parts, with the gorilla population surviving partly because the animals had retreated to the higher volcanic terrain during the crisis period.
The Gorilla Population Through the Crisis
The mountain gorilla population of the Virunga — which numbered approximately 300 individuals at the time of the 1994 genocide — survived the crisis with fewer casualties than conservationists feared at the time. The full habituation programme was disrupted, the daily monitoring by both Karisoke researchers and park rangers was suspended for extended periods, and some gorilla group ranges were affected by refugee movement through the park periphery. But the gorilla families did not disperse from the Virunga, and the post-crisis census — conducted by the International Gorilla Conservation Programme in 1995 — found the population largely intact.
The resumption of gorilla monitoring and protection in the years following 1994 was built with international conservation support that recognised the strategic importance of the Virunga gorilla population as a component of Rwanda’s long-term development — both because the gorillas had intrinsic conservation value and because gorilla tourism was identified early as a potential economic engine for the recovering northern Rwanda economy. The Rwanda government’s decision to channel a significant portion of gorilla tourism revenue directly to the communities neighbouring Volcanoes National Park — the revenue sharing programme — produced a community interest in the gorillas’ continued existence that is one of the structural reasons the gorilla population has grown rather than declined in the post-crisis period.
Akagera — The Rewilding Success
Akagera National Park’s recovery is perhaps the most dramatic rewilding story in Africa in the past twenty years. In 2010, African Parks — a South African conservation organisation with a track record of managing distressed protected areas in southern and eastern Africa — took over the management contract for Akagera from the Rwanda Development Board. The park at that point was reduced to approximately 1,120 square kilometres from its original 2,500 — the remainder having been converted to settlement during the post-genocide resettlement period — and its wildlife population was a fraction of its pre-1994 numbers.
African Parks’ management of Akagera produced results that have become a case study in conservation restoration: lions were reintroduced from South Africa in 2015 (Akagera’s original lion population had been killed in the post-genocide period); black rhinoceros were reintroduced from Europe’s captive conservation programme in 2017 and 2021; the elephant population, which had survived in reduced numbers, was supplemented; and the park boundary was reinforced with electric fencing that separated the park’s wildlife from the adjacent human settlement in a way that allowed wildlife populations to recover without ongoing human-wildlife conflict.
What Makes Rwanda’s Conservation Model Distinctive
The combination of strong government investment in conservation infrastructure, community revenue sharing, international conservation partnerships, and the deliberate development of high-end tourism as the funding mechanism for conservation costs is the model that Rwanda has developed and that has made its conservation outcomes distinctively positive in a regional context where most parks are under continuing pressure. The premium pricing of Rwanda’s gorilla permits — the $1,500 fee that most visitors initially experience as high — is the economic mechanism through which a small country with limited land for national parks manages to maintain those parks at a quality standard that produces conservation outcomes rather than conservation decline.
