Burundi is a country that rarely appears in wildlife conservation headlines, yet it sits at a geographic and ecological crossroads of enormous significance for pangolin survival in Central and East Africa. Wedged between the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Tanzania, with Lake Tanganyika forming its western border, Burundi is among the most densely populated countries in Africa -- a landlocked nation of approximately 12 million people occupying just 27,830 square kilometres, giving it a population density that rivals Bangladesh. This density, combined with decades of political instability and extreme poverty, has placed catastrophic pressure on the country's remaining forests and the wildlife they shelter.
Pangolins in Burundi are largely invisible to international conservation: no systematic national population survey has been conducted, dedicated monitoring programmes do not exist, and the country's wildlife authority has operated at severely reduced capacity since the political crisis of 2015. Yet the forests that remain -- particularly the montane rainforest of Kibira National Park in the Albertine Rift -- harbour populations of white-bellied pangolins and potentially giant ground pangolins that are part of the broader Albertine Rift biodiversity system, one of the most species-rich and threatened ecosystems on the continent.
Ecology and Species Range
Burundi's landscape divides broadly into two ecological zones relevant to pangolin conservation. The western Albertine Rift escarpment, rising from the shores of Lake Tanganyika, supports the montane and submontane rainforest that once covered much of this region. Kibira National Park, covering approximately 40,000 hectares in the northwestern highlands, is the largest remnant of this forest and Burundi's most important protected natural area. Below the escarpment, the Congo-Nile ridge runs north-south through the country, forming the watershed between the Congo and Nile river basins. East of this ridge, the terrain slopes toward the Ruvubu River valley and on into Tanzania.
The white-bellied pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis) is the species most likely to occur in Kibira's montane forest and in the remnant forest patches scattered through the western highlands. This semi-arboreal species inhabits closed-canopy forest with a diverse assemblage of arboreal ant and termite colonies, foraging at night in the lower canopy and understorey. Its presence in adjacent regions of DRC (particularly South Kivu) and Rwanda is well established, making its occurrence in Kibira biologically plausible, though confirmed sightings from Burundi specifically are not well documented in published literature.
The giant ground pangolin (Smutsia gigantea) may occur in forest-savanna mosaic habitats in Burundi's east and in valley forest systems along the Ruvubu and Malagarasi rivers, which connect Burundian forest to the broader Tanzanian ecosystem. This species is primarily terrestrial, feeding on termite colonies in forest clearings and savanna woodland. Its low population densities and large home ranges make it particularly vulnerable to hunting pressure and habitat fragmentation.
The Deforestation Emergency
To understand why pangolin conservation in Burundi is so challenging, it is essential to understand the scale of the country's deforestation crisis. Burundi has one of the lowest per-capita forest cover rates in Africa. Forest cover, which once blanketed most of the country's highlands, has been reduced to isolated remnants, of which Kibira National Park is by far the largest and most significant. The pressures driving deforestation are demographic and economic: Burundi's high population growth rate (approximately 2.8% annually in recent years, though declining) combined with subsistence agriculture that depends on cleared land for cultivation, charcoal production for urban cooking fuel, and artisanal timber harvesting have stripped the landscape with a thoroughness that leaves little intact habitat outside formal protected areas.
Agricultural encroachment on Kibira's borders is a persistent challenge. Farming communities on the park boundary have cleared forest right up to the boundary line, and illegal cultivation of tea and other crops within the park perimeter has been documented repeatedly. The park's buffer zone, where limited land use is permitted, has been substantially converted to agriculture, eliminating the ecological transition zone that is critical for species like pangolins that range across the boundary between core protected habitat and human-modified landscapes.
Charcoal production is particularly destructive. Charcoal from Kibira's forest is an important source of income for communities in the surrounding communes, and illegal cutting for charcoal continues despite legal prohibitions. The selective removal of larger trees for charcoal alters forest structure in ways that reduce the diversity of microhabitats available to pangolins -- eliminating hollow trees used as den sites, reducing the abundance of large arboreal ant and termite colonies, and fragmenting the canopy connectivity that arboreal species require.
Political Crisis and Conservation Collapse
Burundi's conservation institutions entered a period of severe decline following the political crisis that erupted in April 2015, when President Pierre Nkurunziza announced his intention to seek a third term in defiance of constitutional limits. The announcement triggered mass protests in Bujumbura, a failed military coup in May 2015, and a subsequent crackdown that included assassinations of political opponents, torture, and the displacement of approximately 400,000 Burundians who fled to Rwanda, Tanzania, DRC, and Uganda. The European Union suspended direct budget support to Burundi in March 2016, and most major bilateral donors reduced or restructured their engagement with the Burundian state.
For wildlife conservation, the consequences were severe. The Institut National pour l'Environnement et la Conservation de la Nature (INECN), Burundi's state environmental authority responsible for protected area management, lost substantial international funding. Ranger salaries went unpaid for extended periods. Vehicle fleets could not be maintained. Equipment was not replaced. International NGO staff left the country or suspended operations as the security environment deteriorated. The result was a dramatic reduction in the enforcement and monitoring capacity that sustained Kibira and Burundi's other protected areas -- Ruvubu National Park, Rusizi National Park, and a network of smaller reserves.
Political transition following Nkurunziza's death in June 2020 and the election of President Evariste Ndayishimiye has allowed some degree of normalisation with international partners. The EU has cautiously re-engaged with Burundian institutions on governance and development programming. Some conservation donors have resumed contact with INECN. But the conservation capacity lost during five years of crisis does not reconstitute quickly, and many of the international NGO partnerships that provided technical and financial support have not been restored to pre-crisis levels.
Burundi as a Trafficking Transit State
Beyond the immediate threats to domestic pangolin populations, Burundi's position between the DRC's eastern provinces and the East African coast makes it a significant node in the regional trafficking network that moves pangolin products toward export markets.
Eastern DRC -- comprising North Kivu, South Kivu, and Maniema provinces -- is one of the world's most important source regions for illegally traded pangolins. The vast forests of the eastern Congo Basin support large populations of both white-bellied and giant ground pangolins, and decades of civil conflict have created a lawless environment in which wildlife crime operates with near-impunity. Criminal networks operating in DRC's conflict zones extract pangolins and other wildlife at scale, with products moving along routes that have evolved in parallel with the broader artisanal mining and contraband trading networks of the region.
Burundi's geography makes it an efficient transit corridor. From collection points in South Kivu and around Uvira (DRC), pangolin products can cross Lake Tanganyika or the DRC-Burundi land border into Burundian territory, transit through Bujumbura, and continue by road to the Burundi-Tanzania border near Kobero or Manyovu. From there, products enter Tanzania's road network and move toward Dar es Salaam or the northern ports of Tanga and Mombasa (Kenya), where containerised shipping can carry them to East Asian destination markets.
Burundian customs and border authorities have extremely limited capacity for wildlife crime detection. The country's border crossings are primarily managed for agricultural produce, petty trade, and formal commercial traffic. Wildlife product identification training for customs officials is minimal. Intelligence sharing with DRC, Tanzanian, and Kenyan wildlife authorities is irregular. The result is that Burundi's territory is effectively transparent to trafficking flows -- products enter, transit, and exit without systematic interception.
The few documented seizures of pangolin products in Burundi have generally been opportunistic rather than intelligence-driven -- products discovered during general customs inspections rather than targeted wildlife crime operations. TRAFFIC and UNODC have not published Burundi-specific pangolin trafficking analysis comparable to what exists for major East African ports, partly because the country's transit role is less visible than the destination seizures in Dar es Salaam or Mombasa that attract more international attention.
Conservation Presence and Programmes
Despite the challenges, a small but committed conservation presence has maintained activity in Burundi through the crisis years.
The Jane Goodall Institute
The Jane Goodall Institute has maintained a presence in Burundi, primarily focused on chimpanzee conservation and community development in and around Kibira National Park. JGI's community-centred conservation model -- which links wildlife protection to tangible livelihood improvements for forest-adjacent communities -- has demonstrated resilience through Burundi's political disruptions. Community volunteers engaged through JGI programmes have maintained monitoring and reporting activities in Kibira even during periods when INECN's formal presence was reduced. While the programme is not pangolin-specific, the community monitoring networks it has built generate occasional data on pangolin sightings and hunting incidents.
Wildlife Conservation Society
The Wildlife Conservation Society has provided intermittent technical support to INECN for protected area management planning and law enforcement capacity building. WCS's regional programmes covering the greater Congo Basin and Albertine Rift include Burundi within their geographic scope, though the country has not been a primary focus of WCS operations relative to the larger landscape interventions in DRC and Rwanda. WCS has supported the development of management plans for Kibira and Ruvubu national parks and has contributed to ranger training programmes.
African Wildlife Foundation
AWF has worked in Burundi's Kibira-Ruvubu landscape as part of its broader Albertine Rift conservation programme, which spans Uganda, Rwanda, DRC, and Burundi. AWF's integrated landscape approach, which combines species monitoring, community livelihood support, and policy engagement, has the institutional structure to address pangolin conservation needs even where pangolins are not the headline species. AWF has supported the development of community conservancies in Kibira's buffer zone as a mechanism for community-based resource management.
What Pangolin Conservation in Burundi Requires
The pathways toward improved pangolin conservation in Burundi are constrained but identifiable. None of them are quick or cheap, but they are achievable with sustained commitment.
The foundational requirement is rebuilding INECN's operational capacity. An institution that cannot reliably pay ranger salaries, maintain vehicles, and deploy personnel in protected areas cannot protect any species, let alone a cryptic nocturnal mammal that requires targeted monitoring. This requires sustained donor commitment to institutional strengthening, not just project-based funding that flows around state institutions and builds parallel structures with limited government ownership.
On the specific front of pangolin conservation, a national camera trap survey of Kibira National Park and the major valley forest systems would establish the baseline species presence data that currently does not exist. This is a tractable project -- Kibira covers 40,000 hectares, a challenging but not impossible camera trap deployment at moderate station density could provide statistically meaningful presence-absence data within two to three field seasons. The Albertine Rift Conservation Society and regional research consortia have the technical capacity to design and execute such a survey.
Addressing Burundi's role in the DRC-East Africa trafficking corridor requires regional coordination rather than purely national action. A programme of intelligence sharing among Burundian customs, Tanzanian WILDLIFE authority, and Interpol's environmental crime unit, combined with wildlife crime investigation training for Burundian law enforcement, would substantially improve the probability of intercepting trafficked products. UNODC's Container Control Programme, which has been deployed at Dar es Salaam and other East African ports, could be extended to include training for Burundian border officials on wildlife product identification.
Community conservation at Kibira's boundary remains the most important long-term lever. The farming communities that live adjacent to Kibira are the most direct threat to the park's integrity through encroachment and hunting, and also the most important potential allies for monitoring and protection if programmes deliver genuine livelihood benefits. Investment in sustainable agroforestry, improved agricultural yields, and alternative income sources -- combined with formal recognition of community roles in buffer zone management -- creates constituencies for conservation that persist through political disruptions more reliably than state institutions alone.
Burundi's pangolins are caught in the crossfire of a development and political crisis that is not of their making. They persist in the last fragments of forest left standing in one of Africa's most pressured landscapes, and they transit as commodities through a country that lacks the capacity to detect or stop the trade. Addressing both dimensions -- protecting remaining populations and closing the trafficking corridor -- requires sustained external investment in a country that receives far less conservation attention than its ecological and strategic significance warrants. The forests of the Albertine Rift do not recognise national borders. Burundi's pangolins are part of a continental story that begins in the Congo Basin and ends, if the trade continues unchecked, in a warehouse in Guangzhou or Hanoi.