UGANDA 2025; GROWTH AND UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Uganda’s economic year of 2025 ends on a tone that is both promising and unfinished.

Seen through this column’s lens, it feels a bit like hearing a good song and realising the chorus you feel in your bones has barely kicked in. The melody is there. The rhythm holds. But something keeps interrupting the flow.

On the surface, the macro numbers suggest stability. Growth is alive. Inflation is subdued. The shilling has behaved. Our exporters — especially coffee, gold and tourism are bringing home hard currency. Those charts whisper resilience, and that is no small feat given global uncertainties, tightening capital, and a jittery world economy.

Coffee delivered yet another record. In the 12 months to October 2025, Uganda exported about 8.2 million 60-kg bags of coffee, valued at roughly US$2.3 billion (Sh8.1 trillion) — the highest figure in our history. That represents about a 64% increase in export value year-on-year, proof that even smallholder beans, when steered through cooperative value chains and favourable prices, can become national hard-currency anchors.

Gold and minerals, too, did heavy lifting. Merchandise export receipts climbed over 50% year-on-year to around US$1.25 billion, with gold an increasingly meaningful contributor alongside coffee. And tourism quietly reclaimed its place as a foreign-exchange pillar. By March 2025, foreign visitors had generated about US$1.52 billion, a strong rebound from pandemic lulls that underlines Uganda’s enduring appeal as a travel destination.

Yet here is the part most Ugandans live every day rather than chart every week: good numbers do not automatically translate into accessible opportunity.

Domestic arrears — money owed by government for goods and services already delivered  continued to sap liquidity from the private sector. For contractors, suppliers and small firms, delayed payments meant delayed investment, heavier borrowing and cautious hiring. Arrears do not announce themselves as crises in macro tables; they show up quietly as stalled projects, idle machinery and jobs that never materialise.

This is also where corruption, as documented repeatedly in this column this year, reveals its most damaging form. Not corruption as headlines and handcuffs, but corruption as delay, opacity and rent-seeking. The kickback that inflates contract costs. The procurement process slowed until “something moves.” The invoice that waits, not because money is unavailable, but because incentives are misaligned. Economically, corruption functions like sand in the gears — raising transaction costs, distorting competition and quietly taxing honest enterprise.

Mobile money. It is no longer tangential to the economy; it has become Uganda’s unofficial banking system. MTN’s MoMo platform alone serves more than ten million active users, forming the informal financial spine of inclusion — paying merchants, sending remittances and settling bills with a tap.

The scale is staggering. 

In 2024, Ugandans transacted about Sh159 trillion through MTN Mobile Money, an average of Sh435 billion every single day, amounting to roughly 4.3 billion transactions in a year. As of mid-2025, Uganda counted about 34.6 million active mobile money subscribers, dwarfing traditional banking penetration and underscoring just how central digital finance has become to everyday economic life.

But scale is not the same as depth. High transaction volumes do not automatically produce wealth. Many users still treat mobile money as a pass-through — in today, out tomorrow — rather than as a platform for saving, investing or borrowing productively. And here again, corruption lurks quietly: fake agent float shortages, weak consumer protection, and regulatory blind spots that allow inefficiency to persist. Mobile money has opened the door to inclusion, but it has not yet completed the journey to wealth building.

We saw something similar with the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) in 2025. The Fund posted one of its strongest years, growing assets from about Sh22.1 trillion to nearly Sh26 trillion and paying out record benefits. That matters. Pension capital is patient capital — the kind economies need for long-term investment. But compliance challenges persisted, particularly among smaller employers squeezed by cash-flow pressures and delayed payments. Again, institutional strength collided with the lived economy.

So where does this leave us as we close 2025?

Uganda’s economic story is not one of stagnation — far from it. Exports are firing on multiple cylinders. Tourism dollars are returning. Mobile money and digital finance are reshaping how people transact and interact with the economy. Institutional savers like NSSF are sitting on growing pools of investable capital.

Yet the felt experience — that moment when a parent pays school fees without anxiety, or a micro-entrepreneur accesses credit at a reasonable rate remains uneven. Growth is present, but distribution is patchy. Systems exist, but trust is thin.

That is the real lesson of 2025. Resilience is necessary, but inclusion is indispensable

. Macro figures matter, but they must be married to integrity, execution and household realities. Growth can be strong without being broad. And corruption, left untreated, does not always collapse economies — it slowly robs them of momentum.

The task for 2026 and beyond is therefore clear: execution that reaches people, credit that empowers production, and mobile finance that goes beyond payment into saving and investment — all underpinned by systems that reward efficiency rather than extraction.

Because statistics can tell you how big an economy is.
But only lived lives tell you whether it’s working.