If you are writing about the Rwizi, we will help even if the story is not about us. The river gets more useful coverage that way.
Contacts
Media enquiries go through the contact form with "Press or media" selected, or by phone on +256 781 013 376. Both reach the Executive Director directly.
We aim to respond within one working day, including to enquiries we expect to be critical. If we cannot answer something we will say so rather than declining to comment, which usually means the same thing but reads worse.
What we can offer
- Background briefing on the Rwizi catchment, with sources, on or off the record.
- Access to restoration sites, subject to landowner and household consent.
- Interviews in English or Runyankole.
- Our monitoring data, including the readings that got worse.
- Photographs we own, licensed for editorial use with a credit line.
- Referrals to researchers and district officials who know more than we do about specific aspects.
What we will not do
We will not arrange access to a household for filming without that household's prior, informed consent, and we will not facilitate a story that identifies an individual as an illegal cultivator or sand miner. The consequences of that fall on them, not on us.
Facts about the Rwizi we can evidence
Everything below we can point you to a source for, including sources that are not us. Anything we cannot evidence, we will tell you we cannot evidence.
- The course: rises in the Buhweju hills, runs east and then south through the Mbarara area, and reaches Lake Victoria via the lakes of the lower catchment.
- The scale of dependence: roughly six million people across the districts the catchment touches.
- The elevation profile, from public SRTM elevation data, which anyone can check independently.
- Documented pressures: sand mining, brick-making, eucalyptus on wetland margins, cultivation to the waterline, and untreated discharge from several categories of premises.
- Our own monitoring: six points, quarterly since 2023, one of them a control on an unrestored stretch.
- Our own delivery figures: 6.4 km of bank replanted and surviving at twelve months, 11,200 seedlings planted since 2022, 61% average survival at twelve months.
Questions journalists ask
Will you give me a figure for how much the river has shrunk?
Not one we can stand behind. Figures for historic water level circulate widely and we have not been able to trace most of them to a measurement. We would rather be the organisation that says so than another link in the chain that repeats it.
Can I film at a restoration site?
Usually yes, subject to the landowner's and the household's prior consent, which we will ask for rather than assume. Give us a few days.
Will you criticise a named company or official?
We will describe what our monitoring shows at a given point on a given date. We will not attribute a reading to a named source unless we can evidence the attribution, because getting that wrong ends the district relationships the work depends on.
Can I speak to someone who is not a spokesperson?
Yes, and it is usually a better interview. Field officers and community group members speak for themselves, on their own terms, and we do not sit in on it unless asked to.
What is your line on the sector?
We do not have one, and we are wary of being used to criticise other organisations working on the same river. Ask us about our own record instead; we publish the parts of it that went badly.
Can I have this in Runyankole?
Interviews, yes. Written material, ask — the site is in English and translation is done properly or not at all.
Boilerplate and logos
Standard organisational description, approved photographs and logo files.