Entebbe Zoo re-opens

ENTEBBE  | UWEC  | TOURISM

The Uganda Wildlife Conservation Education Centre (UWEC) commonly known as Entebbe Zoo has re-opened its gates after five months of lock-down.

The re-opening, which was announced on Saturday(August 8,2020), came a day after the tourism minister Tom Butime and Lilly Ajarova the Chief Executive Officer for Uganda Tourism Board toured the centre to confirm its preparedness to resume operations.

Dr. James Musinguzi, the UWEC Executive Director, had earlier revealed that not more than 300 people shall be allowed inside the animal centre on a given day.

According to Musinguzi, limiting the number of visitors is among the many Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) developed by UWEC directors and board members as a way to control the spread of Covid19 both to humans and animals.

"All these SOPs including screening, sanitizing, social distancing among others are contained in a document we had issued to the health ministry and the national task-force for approval before the Zoo was opened," said Musinguzi.

Col. Tom Butime the minister for tourism, lauded the management of Entebbe Zoo for having worked hard to survive the ripple effects of Covid19.

"I have appointed a task-force in the ministry to work out modalities with Uganda tourism association, Uganda hoteliers association and other stakeholders on how Ugandans can salvage the tourism industry by embracing domestic tourism," said minister Butime during his earlier tour of the centre. "Now that we have learnt from this bitter experience of Covid19, we shall learn to domesticate our tourism industry," added Col. Butime.

Having remained closed for several months, the centre made tremendous losses since it could no longer get money from gate-collection. Having to feed animals with food worth Sh3m every day, the Zoo managers had to appeal for help from the government and well-wishers.

In response, the government remitted Sh756m to UWEC while private individuals and companies donated cash and food items totalling to over Sh65m.