Monitoring law-enforcement performance in nine protected areas in Ghana

In Ghana, budgetary allocations for protected area management have been consistently low. To improve cost-effectiveness and performance of law enforcement, monitoring feedback was used to provide the foundation for informed management decisions. Between 2004 and 2006, a system to monitor staff performance, patrol effort, illegal wildlife use, and trends in large-mammal populations was established in seven protected areas. In two national parks, where GIS-based monitoring systems were in place, in the course of 2006, data were standardised and analysed in the same way. Encounters on patrol with illegal activities and large mammals were corrected for patrol effort and the size of the area to enable comparing encounter rates in different protected areas. In December 2005, law-enforcement performance was evaluated in six protected areas. Through dissemination of the evaluation report, the poor performance of patrol staff and high levels of illegal activity in five out of six sites entered the public domain, and created a spirit of competition between protected areas. The present evaluation showed that in the course of 2006, in the six sites evaluated, patrol performance improved by 59% on average, compared to only 11% in the two parks that were not evaluated. In the four savannah sites evaluated, poaching was reduced by 72%, but only by 17% in the two forest sites evaluated. This compares with a reduction in poaching of 33% in the two parks. Patrol data were open to several types of error. Although reliability of patrol data was checked at different hierarchical levels, the final check was at headquarters in Accra, comparing seasonal fluctuations in large-mammal encounters with those in two control areas. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.