Envoys outline obstacles limiting Ugandan exports

KAMPALA — The foreign ministry has told Ugandan embassies to stop reporting how many trade meetings they hold and start reporting how much money those meetings actually bring in, as a review of the government’s economic diplomacy strategy exposed a wide gap between the country’s regional ambitions and its trade performance.

The instruction came from Permanent Secretary Vincent Bagiire Waiswa as he opened a four-day retreat in Kampala on Monday, bringing together the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, heads of Uganda’s missions abroad, several government ministries and agencies, and the Uganda Investment Authority to assess three years of work under the country’s Economic and Commercial Diplomacy strategy.

The retreat, held at the Mestil Hotel and running until 9 July under the title “Strengthening Institutional Collaboration for Effective Economic and Commercial Diplomacy Implementation,” is the government’s most detailed public accounting yet of what its embassies have delivered — and where the strategy is falling short.

It was convened by the Ministry’s Department of Regional Economic Cooperation specifically to bring together the ministries, departments and agencies responsible for the core pillars of the ECD strategy — agriculture, tourism, manufacturing and services (ATMS) — with officials saying the goal was to work through bottlenecks between those agencies and agree on coordination mechanisms that directly support Uganda’s private sector producers and exporters.

Opening the meeting, Permanent Secretary Mr. Bagiire Vincent Waiswa told delegates the strategy itself was sound but its execution needed to change.

He praised Uganda’s overseas missions for the consultative work behind them, but said the government could no longer measure success by the number of events held or meetings convened.

Missions, he said, needed to move from activity to outcomes, backing their work with solid statistics and proper documentation rather than anecdote.

He announced that the Ministry has set up what it calls an ECD Operations Hub, intended to automate coordination between missions abroad, Ministry headquarters in Kampala, and the various government departments and agencies whose cooperation the strategy depends on.

He also pressed missions to sharpen their annual work plans and to publicise Uganda’s opportunities more aggressively, in coordination with the Ministry’s public diplomacy department, arguing that visibility abroad was as important as the deals themselves.

He linked the effort to Uganda’s wider ambition of a tenfold expansion of the economy and to the government’s long-standing Vision 2040 development plan.

Ambassador Richard Kabonero, who heads the department running the strategy, called the past year the department’s most productive yet and described the retreat as a chance to take stock before the new financial year beginning in 2026/27.

The scale of the task was laid out by Uganda’s mission in South Sudan, which presented economic data placing Uganda third by output among the eight members of the East African Community, behind Kenya’s roughly $147bn economy and Tanzania’s $95bn, and just behind the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The eight countries together produce about $435bn a year and are home to 355 million people.

The mission’s presentation identified a persistent gap between what Uganda’s public institutions promise investors and traders and what its private sector can actually deliver, describing this coordination deficit as one of the main reasons the country has not converted its regional standing into greater trade volumes, alongside a set of recommendations specific to opportunities and constraints in South Sudan itself.

Uganda’s mission in Switzerland offered the retreat’s most granular account of what commercial diplomacy looks like in practice.

Presented by Deputy Permanent Representative Arthur Kafeero, whose post in Geneva carries dual accreditation to the Swiss government and to more than 40 international organisations including the World Trade Organization, the mission has built its work around tourism, agro-industrial trade, sport-linked marketing and multilateral advocacy. Its tourism pitch rests on Switzerland’s unusual concentration of wealth: Geneva, a city of 211,000 people, counts 16 billionaires and roughly 90,000 millionaires; Zurich has 12 billionaires and about 99,300 millionaires.

Swiss residents spent an estimated 19.3bn francs, or roughly $24bn, travelling abroad last year, and the mission argues that a small share of that spending, at $50,000 to $250,000 a trip for high-end safari and lodge packages, would transform Uganda’s earnings from Swiss visitors.

Mission staff told the retreat they had already begun landing bookings this year, including multi-week trips to Uganda and Rwanda, with some travel agents now placing repeat business for 2027.

They are also exploring advertising tied to Swiss public transport, which carries six million commuters daily, and to Swiss ice hockey, a sport whose championship games draw around seven million television viewers among fans with high disposable incomes and a strong travel habit.

The mission’s central frustration, however, is the absence of a direct flight: Uganda drew only 107 Swiss visitors in 2024, and airlines typically require a minimum of 550 one-way passengers a week for at least four months of the year before considering a new route, a threshold the mission believes could eventually be met by pooling demand with Kenya or Tanzania.

On trade, the Geneva mission pointed to Switzerland’s position as one of the world’s principal coffee trading centres, home to Sucafina, whose Ugandan subsidiary UGACOF is the country’s largest coffee exporter, and to Nestlé, the world’s largest coffee and chocolate manufacturer.

Coffee, mission officials argued, is one of the few genuine economic bridges already built between the two economies, and they pointed to planned appearances at coffee-trade events in Brussels and a Swiss coffee traders’ forum later this year as ways to deepen it.

The mission is also coordinating with the finance ministry and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development on Uganda’s graduation from Least Developed Country status, a process whose criteria Uganda met in March 2024, with a national validation workshop due in August this year and formal graduation expected around 2030 to 2032; officials argue the change in status would improve investor confidence and access to financing. Separately, the mission is working with the International Trade Centre in Geneva on a programme to improve Ugandan exporters’ access to European Union markets for products including avocado, cocoa, coffee, spices and tea, and on a scheme to expand financial inclusion and skills training for young women working in fashion, film and other creative industries.

A less optimistic picture came from Uganda’s mission in Abuja. Nigeria’s economy, at roughly $334bn, is nearly five times the size of Uganda’s, and its population of 236 million anchors a wider ECOWAS market of 442 million people.

Yet Uganda’s recorded exports to Nigeria — spanning tobacco, coffee, hides and skins, powdered milk, palm oil, fish, pharmaceuticals and precious minerals — totalled only about $34.6m, led by tobacco at $17.2m and pharmaceutical products, mainly antimalarials and antiretrovirals from Quality Chemicals, at roughly $11m. Presenting the mission’s findings, Dr Omara Sam attributed the shortfall to a mix of practical and structural obstacles: long shipping distances, currency restrictions, limits on foreign ownership and capital movement, import quotas and licensing rules, the slow rollout of a Nigeria–East and Southern Africa air cargo route agreed in 2025, and what he described as the unreliability of Uganda Airlines’ own service on the route.

He also pointed to supply-side weaknesses back in Uganda as a constraint. Proposed remedies included making fuller use of Uganda’s African Continental Free Trade Area commitments, negotiating better terms bilaterally, using free trade zones and bonded warehousing, diversifying suppliers, and increasing trade missions in both directions — along with a note that Nigeria’s newly acquired first domestically owned cargo vessel could eventually help lower shipping costs between West and East Africa.

Framing the investment side of the strategy, the Uganda Investment Authority set out the pitch it takes to prospective investors: a liberalised economy with no restrictions on foreign ownership in most sectors, free repatriation of profits, and what the authority describes as the fastest-growing economy in the East African Community, with GDP above $40bn. It highlighted preferential access to markets including the EAC’s 300 million consumers, the 600-million-strong Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, and the 1.3 billion people covered by the African Continental Free Trade Area, alongside duty-free access to the European Union and the United States.

Its project pipeline runs into billions of dollars: about $7bn proposed for mining and mineral processing covering gold, tin, lithium and rare earths; $5.1bn for hydropower projects including plants at Kiba, Ayago and Oriang, alongside a mooted 8,400-megawatt nuclear plant at Buyende estimated at $30bn; $1.4bn for expanding the electricity distribution network; and transport schemes including a $1bn light rail system for greater Kampala and a $424m bus rapid transit project. Smaller agro-processing proposals range from a $60m instant coffee plant and a $97m fruit-processing factory to a $58m cotton-spinning mill.

The authority said its “one-stop centre,” which bundles business registration, tax advice, immigration and land clearance under one roof, had helped allocate land to 514 companies across the country’s industrial parks, of which 199 are now operational, together employing more than 100,000 people directly and indirectly and drawing close to $3bn in capital investment — though it acknowledged some parks, including ones planned for Karamoja and the Koboko-Oraba border area, remain at early feasibility stages.

The first day of the retreat closed with a discussion on what needs to change for the strategy to work at scale, and a session in which mission heads aired their frustrations directly. Wednesday’s sessions turn to how government ministries and agencies view their own role in trade promotion, investment facilitation and market intelligence, before the retreat moves on to capacity building and coordination questions ahead of the financial year starting in July.