Come and shape it with us

The licence provides for an exclusive 20-bed wilderness lodge and a 40-bed mid-range camp. We are not building them ourselves. We are looking for operators who will design, build and run them under long-term site leases with a conservation fee attached to every bed-night.

Sites will be identified with the National Forestry Authority after survey. Candidates include the Kidepo River frontage with its palms and rock pools, and hilltop positions in the foothills below Mount Zulia with 360-degree views over the whole Kidepo system (see the layered map on the concession page).

Access is better than the map suggests: the Apoka airstrip is 1 h 45 by air from Entebbe and 23 km from the boundary, and Kidepo International Airport, now under construction, will be 21 km away.

Protection in Zulia will cost more than tourism can pay for in the first decade; that is true of every remote landscape in Africa. The Zulia Conservation Trust is being formed to hold the ranger force, the fire and water programme, the monitoring and the community work, with the regulators and the communities on its board and audited accounts from the first year.

We work alongside, not instead of, the institutions already in the landscape: the Uganda Wildlife Authority and the National Forestry Authority as our regulators and co-managers, and the organisations supporting the Kidepo Valley conservation landscape. Zulia is the piece of that landscape with no one yet funding it.

Kidepo has lost its roan and Beisa oryx, and Bright's gazelle, kudu and eland survive in tens or low hundreds. The licence provides for game ranching under Uganda Wildlife Authority licensing, and we plan four breeding ranches on the reserve's gentle, watered western side: a breeding hub, a predator-proof roan complex, a plains ranch for eland, oryx and hartebeest, and a community ranch for gazelle and ostrich.

Five species start from about 125 founders of East African subspecies, bred to IUCN translocation standards. On the base case the ranches release around 330 animals to Kidepo and other parks in their first ten years. We are looking for ranch operators, sanctuary partners, species sponsors and restocking partners.

Kidepo Valley National Park records around 475 bird species, the second-highest total of any Ugandan park, with a run of dry-country specials found nowhere else in the country: ostrich, Kori bustard, secretarybird, Abyssinian ground hornbill, Jackson's hornbill, Clapperton's francolin, pygmy falcon, Egyptian vulture, Karamoja apalis and the Ethiopian–Somali species that reach their western limit here. Zulia is the same landscape with more altitude, more riverine forest and no records at all.

We are looking for one or two birding operators to help build the species list, scout the sites and bring the first groups, working from the shared base camp and the fly camps on the river. The reserve's altitude range, from the Kidepo River at 1,040 m to the summit at 2,149 m, promises montane species on the escarpment that have never been documented on the Ugandan side.

The licence provides for research access on agreed terms. We welcome botanists, ecologists, archaeologists and film crews, and we have a particular interest in partners for the aerial work: wildlife census, boundary mapping, fire detection and patrol, where a light aircraft or drone does in a morning what a vehicle cannot do in a month.