Kigosi National Park

A national park that Parliament voted to abolish

Kigosi has to begin with its legal status, because that status changed, and much of what is still published about the place describes it as something it no longer is.

Kigosi National Park was created by Government Notice No. 924 of 2019, covering 7,460 square kilometres. The Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism, Mohamed Mchengerwa, gave both of those facts to Parliament on 27 June 2023 — and he gave them while asking Parliament to undo the park. On that day the National Assembly passed a resolution, under section 4 of the National Parks Act (Cap 282), approving the revocation of Kigosi National Park in order to allow the creation of a Kigosi Forest Reserve under the Tanzania Forest Services Agency.

The reasoning was stated plainly in the chamber. Before the area became first a game reserve and then a national park, part of it was the Nikonga River and Usungwa forest reserves, where people from Bukombe, Mbogwe, Kahama and Ushetu kept bees and fished. The National Parks Act does not permit those activities inside a park; the Forest Act (Cap 323) permits them inside a forest reserve under permit. The minister told Parliament the change would benefit five regions — Geita, Kagera, Kigoma, Shinyanga and Tabora — across six districts, Bukombe, Mbogwe, Biharamulo, Kakonko, Kahama and Kaliua, taking in 25 wards, 126 villages and 113,547 households.

The parliamentary land and natural resources committee added two things worth recording. It said the change would relieve TANAPA, which would then manage 21 parks rather than 22, and noted that Kigosi National Park was not generating sufficient revenue. It also found that residents and their representatives had not been fully involved in the process of abolishing the park.

TANAPA’s own material now reflects the outcome. Its General Brochure of October 2024 states that the authority oversees 21 national parks and names all 21; Kigosi is not among them, and appears only once in the whole document, in the Ugalla River chapter, which describes that park as “centrally located between the National Parks Kigosi, Mahale, Katavi and Ruaha”. TANAPA’s website carries a microsite for each of those same 21 parks and none for Kigosi.

How big it is depends on which document you read

There is no single agreed figure. The minister put the national park at 7,460 square kilometres. The parliamentary committee, in the same sitting, described the forest reserve that would replace it as 9,861 square kilometres. The World Database on Protected Areas still carries a record under the name Kigosi National Park with a reported area of 9,261 square kilometres. Anyone quoting one number as the size of Kigosi is quoting one of three.

The wetland it belongs to

Whatever it is called, the land itself is part of something much larger and much better documented. The Kigosi is one of five main rivers — with the Malagarasi, Moyowosi, Gombe and Ugalla — in a basin draining 9.2 million hectares, and the swamps it feeds lie inside the Malagarasi-Muyovozi Wetlands, designated as Ramsar Site No. 1024 on 13 April 2000 and covering 3.25 million hectares across Kigoma, Shinyanga and Tabora regions. The Ramsar listing records the national designations then in force, which included the Muyowosi and Kigosi Game Reserves.

The Ramsar Information Sheet describes a landscape of floodplain grasslands, papyrus swamps, lakes and rivers, surrounded by extensive miombo woodland, at an average altitude of about 1,200 metres.

The birds, and the sitatunga

This is the reason the ecosystem is internationally known, and the figures below come from that same Ramsar Information Sheet, which draws on wildlife censuses carried out between 1990 and 1993. They are three decades old and should be read as such.

The sheet gives an estimated shoebill population of between 1,000 and 2,500 birds for the Moyowosi and Kigosi swamp areas alone, and reports a 1992 total count over just 36,800 hectares that found 578 shoebills, reaching a density in places of five birds per square kilometre. Wattled crane were estimated at 200 to 500 birds. More than 500 goliath herons and 1,400 saddle-billed storks were counted in the Moyowosi and Kigosi swamps and Lake Sagara alone.

For mammals, the sheet records this as one of the few areas in Tanzania where sitatunga — an antelope adapted to life in swamps — occur inside a protected area, and possibly one of East Africa’s largest protected populations. It also lists hippopotamus, crocodile, buffalo, topi, zebra, waterbuck, reedbuck and lion, with elephant present in small numbers. It is equally candid about the pressures: heavy poaching over the preceding twenty years had significantly reduced some large mammal populations.

Visiting: be realistic

There is no published visitor information for Kigosi. No fee schedule, route, camp or booking channel for the area could be found from any official Tanzanian source, and the plainest evidence of why is the committee’s own finding that the park was not earning enough to justify itself. It held national park status for four years, and TANAPA’s current brochure and website carry neither a chapter nor a page for it.

What the area now permits, under the Forest Act, is beekeeping and fishing by permit — activities for local livelihoods, not a tourism product. Anyone with a serious reason to go would need to arrange access and permissions directly with the forest authority rather than through anything published. The relevant reading here is bird watching and, for the wider context, conservation tours.

What is nearby

The nearest comparable place that is actually a functioning national park is Ugalla River, which TANAPA does still run and which sits in the same river system. Tabora and Kigoma are the regional towns on this side of the country, and how you reach either is covered in the guide to getting around Tanzania.

Common questions about Kigosi