Eight Permits a Day
Uganda sells eight gorilla permits per habituated group per day and not one more, which caps the entire country's supply at something on the order of two hundred people a morning. Rwanda answered the same constraint in 2017 by doubling its price to 1,500 dollars; Uganda decided not to follow, and the two neighbours have been running opposite experiments on the same animal ever since.
The briefing at Buhoma starts at half past seven and the arithmetic is explained before anything else. You will be one of eight. The group you are assigned has been visited by eight people a day, every day, for years, and will be visited by eight tomorrow. You get one hour once the trackers find them, measured from the moment of contact, and the hour does not extend for weather, for photographs or for the fact that you have flown a long way. You stand ten metres back and you wear a mask.
That permit costs 800 dollars for a foreign non-resident, which is what the Uganda Wildlife Authority raised it to in July 2024, from 700. Multiply it out and the whole national supply is small: somewhere between twenty and twenty-five habituated groups in Bwindi depending on whose list you take, plus the one in Mgahinga, eight permits each, so around two hundred people a day can legally be near a mountain gorilla in Uganda. That number is not a marketing decision. It is the constraint the entire industry is built around, and everything interesting about gorilla tourism in this country follows from what you do with a supply you cannot increase quickly.
The number that cannot move
Mountain gorillas share the great majority of their DNA with us and, more to the point, our respiratory viruses. A cold that inconveniences a visitor for four days can kill an infant gorilla, and habituated groups — animals that have learned not to run from people — are exposed to that risk daily and cannot be vaccinated against it. Hence the eight, the hour, the distance, the masks and the rule that anyone visibly ill is sent back to the lodge. The only way to sell more permits is to habituate more groups, and that means two to three years of trackers walking behind a wild family every day until it stops fleeing, with no revenue at any point in the process and no guarantee the group will settle in a range the park can work in. Uganda has done this repeatedly, mostly in the southern sectors around Rushaga and Nkuringo. It is the slowest capacity expansion in tourism.
The price Uganda did not match
In May 2017 Rwanda doubled its gorilla permit from 750 dollars to 1,500 overnight. The stated logic was straightforward: fixed supply, excess demand, so raise the price until the two meet and capture the difference for conservation rather than leaving it with tour operators. Uganda, with roughly half the world's mountain gorillas on the other side of the same forest belt, could have followed within a week and did not. It went to 700 in 2020 and to 800 four years later, and it has stayed well under half the Rwandan figure throughout. In February 2026 it moved in the other direction again, cutting the permit to 600 dollars in April, May and November — the first time Uganda has priced the calendar rather than the animal, and a smaller lever than Rwanda's but pulled the opposite way. The third option, Virunga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has long been cheaper than either and has closed to visitors more than once for reasons that have nothing to do with pricing.
The divergence is not really about the permit. Rwanda sells a short, expensive trip — fly into Kigali, drive two hours, track, leave — and prices the rest of the stay to match. Uganda sells a fortnight. Bwindi is eight hours from the capital by road, and the permit is the anchor of an itinerary that also pays for Murchison, Kibale, Queen Elizabeth, a driver, fuel, a dozen lodges and park fees in four districts. One country is maximising revenue per visitor at a single site; the other is using a scarce permit to pull spending across a whole country. Both are defensible and they are not the same business.
A permit that is cheap enough to be the reason for a two-week trip is worth more to the districts along the road than a permit priced so that nobody needs to drive anywhere.
Where the money is supposed to go
The Uganda Wildlife Act of 2019 requires that 20 per cent of park entry fee revenue be passed to the local governments neighbouring the protected area, and it went further than its 1996 predecessor by establishing a route to compensation for people whose crops, livestock or bodies are damaged by wildlife — a provision that matters far more to a farmer on the Bwindi boundary than any share of gate takings, because the animal that comes out of the forest at night is usually an elephant or a baboon and the loss is a season's food. On top of that, ten dollars from every gorilla permit sold is earmarked for community projects around Bwindi and Mgahinga, and an older instrument sits underneath both: the Bwindi Mgahinga Conservation Trust, capitalised in 1994 with an endowment from the Global Environment Facility and designed to fund local projects from investment income rather than from whatever a donor budgets that year. What the money buys is legible if you walk the boundary — classroom blocks, water tanks, clinics, and lodges owned by the community rather than by an operator in Kampala. What it does not buy is the ability to enter the forest. That is the trade the whole system rests on, and it is worth stating precisely: the people living against the park wall are compensated for exclusion in cash and infrastructure, and the exclusion is permanent.
Who was living there
Bwindi and Mgahinga were gazetted as national parks in 1991. The Batwa who had been living in and from those forests were moved out at that point, and because they held no title to land they were not treated as displaced owners and received nothing. They spent the next three decades as squatters and labourers on other people's farms outside a forest they were now forbidden to enter. Batwa organisations petitioned Uganda's Constitutional Court in 2013, and in August 2021 the court gave judgment: it found the gazetting itself lawful — the forests were taken for a public purpose — but held that carrying out the eviction without compensation had violated the petitioners' rights, and it ordered the state to compensate them and to take steps towards restoring access to their ancestral lands. Implementation has been slow, as it usually is. What the ruling establishes is something most conservation histories in this region never reached: a domestic court, not an international one, finding that the bill for the park was never fully paid.
Whether the animals are actually better off
They are, and unusually for a conservation claim this one gets counted rather than asserted. The Virunga Massif survey of 2015 and 2016 put 604 gorillas in the volcanoes across the Uganda–Rwanda–Congo border, and on the strength of that and a rising trend at Bwindi the IUCN moved the mountain gorilla from Critically Endangered to Endangered in November 2018. The Bwindi–Sarambwe count published at the end of 2019 then added 459, which took the world total to 1,063 — the first time it had passed a thousand since anyone was counting. That is still the figure everyone quotes, and both halves of it are now old: a fresh Bwindi–Sarambwe census went into the forest in May 2025 and the result is not out, and nobody has re-counted the Virungas in a decade. It remains the only great ape subspecies whose population is growing. The mechanism was not sentiment. It was money arriving in a form that made an intact forest worth more standing than cleared, plus veterinary intervention on habituated groups, plus rangers who are paid, and all three depend on those eight permits a day continuing to sell. That is the uncomfortable part: a conservation success financed by tourism is only as stable as tourism, and the two years when nobody flew anywhere were a demonstration nobody in Kigezi wants repeated. Uganda's answer has been to keep the price low enough that demand is broad rather than narrow. Whether that is prudence or 700 dollars a head left on the table is the argument, and it will not be settled by anybody who has only tracked once.