The Hidden Cost of Eco-Tourism

While poring through my photo library for a pending project, I came across these images from a past project in Uganda with Hurinet, a Human Rights organization. 

This project was in 2006, and it is never far from my mind. These people live in the most abject poverty I have witnessed. The Batwa Pygmys (along with other indigenous groups in the Bwindi Forest bordering Uganda, DR Congo and Rwanda) were physically ejected from their ancestral forests in the name of 'Eco-Tourism.' 

The three settlements I visited were each just outside the forest perimeter. These people who were raised as caretakers of the forest were forced out without an alternative place to live or being taught alternative skills to survive in the foreign agrarian society they now find themselves. Ostracized by the local villagers, forgotten by the very government that forced them out, they are truly living life on the edge.

These are some of the faces of Eco-tourism gone wrong.


(Please note: all images are copyright Cheryl Nemazie, all rights reserved. Please send me for usage enquiries. Thank you!)

Wife of the Tribal Leader sits by her doorway in the Nyakabungo settlement
outside the Bwindi Forest.

Without a vocabulary to converse in the past, nor words for the future, Batwa men are in limbo following their forced extradition from their ancestral forest.

A Batwa woman nurses her child at the Rwamahano Settlement in Uganda.

Forced from ancestral forests, outcast from local villages, a Batwa child sits in a field somewhere in between the two.

Poverty and ostracization denies Batwa children access to government-run schools. This boy attends a school funded by a Human Rights organization within his Rwamahano settlement.

Human Rights group HURINET works with local NGOs in targeting exceptional Batwa children to attend a village school with the hope of equipping them to advocate for their people's future.