From sanctuary to silence,
and back again.

People have lived on and around these plains for centuries. The Kadam and Tepeth peoples hold that they took to the mountains when the Karamojong arrived from the north in the seventeenth century, and the pastoralist life that shapes Karamoja today was already old when the first Europeans arrived.

What drew those outsiders was ivory. In the early twentieth century Karamoja was one of the last great elephant countries in Africa, remote enough to be barely mapped and rich enough to be worth the journey. One Scottish hunter took his name from it: Karamojo Bell, who killed more than a thousand elephants in his career, and on a single fourteen-month expedition through this region took out over nine tons of ivory.

The elephant herds that once crossed these plains did not vanish by accident. They were carried out, tusk by tusk.

From 1916 the British administered Karamoja as a closed district. Movement in and out was restricted and a permit was required to enter. The effect was twofold: the plains and their wildlife were left largely undisturbed while much of East Africa was opened up, and the people of Karamoja were sealed off from the schools, roads and services being built elsewhere in Uganda. Both legacies are still visible today, in the wildlife that survived here and in a region that remains among the country's poorest.

By 1960, with independence approaching, the wildlife of these plains was considered valuable enough to protect formally. The sanctuary declared that year took its name from the mountain on its eastern horizon, then called Debasien. Today that mountain is known as Kadam, and it still stands over the reserve.

In 1960, the area was formally designated as the Debasien Animal Sanctuary, a protected designation that recognised both its ecological value and the need for some form of governance over the wildlife populations that remained.

In 1964, the sanctuary was upgraded and officially gazetted as Pian Upe Game Reserve, Uganda’s largest wildlife reserve. The name reflects the Pian people, one of the principal Karamojong clans whose ancestral lands overlap with the reserve, and the Pokot.

At gazettement, the reserve held substantial wildlife populations. Buffalo were present in the thousands. Elephants moved through seasonally. Roan antelope, now reduced to Uganda's only remaining population within this reserve, grazed the open grasslands. The landscape was intact, productive, and ecologically rich.

The instability that swept Uganda from the 1970s, combined with the proliferation of weapons and the breakdown of wildlife authority presence across the northeast, led to catastrophic declines. Elephants were poached to near local extinction. Buffalo, once in the thousands, fell to a fraction of viable levels. Lions disappeared.

The scale of what was lost is written into the record: the first aerial census, in 1968, counted more than 9,000 animals, and hunting journals from the early twentieth century describe elephant and rhino that were gone from the landscape within a few decades. By the 1990s, rangers were absent or ineffective, infrastructure had collapsed, and Pian Upe existed more on paper than on the ground.

A "paper park": gazetted and mapped, but without the management capacity to make that status meaningful.

In 2008, a 20-year hunting concession agreement was signed with Karimojong Overland Safaris, a professional sport hunting operator. It brought private-sector investment and operational presence back to the reserve, and established a governance structure that distributed revenues to nine surrounding district governments.

KOS played a critical role, in support of the Uganda Wildlife Authority, in keeping Pian Upe intact during a period when, without any operational presence, encroachment and poaching could have erased whatever wildlife remained. Their presence, investment in basic infrastructure, and relationship with surrounding communities provided a foundation on which future conservation could be built.

Uganda's first co-management agreement

In 2021, Space for Giants began discussions with the Uganda Wildlife Authority about taking on a formal management mandate within Pian Upe, working alongside KOS but bringing dedicated conservation expertise, ecological monitoring, and sustainable finance development.

After approximately two years of negotiation and relationship building, working through the complexities of what co-management actually means in practice, the Uganda Wildlife Authority Board of Trustees approved Space for Giants’ involvement in 2022, and the formal co-management agreement was signed in August 2022 in Soroti: a structured, nationally endorsed partnership placing conservation at the centre of how the reserve is managed.

Transformation journey: 1960 to present

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