There was a time, not too long ago, when you could tell the direction of Uganda’s exchange rate by simply looking at the coffee calendar.
As a young
reporter filing for Reuters in the late 1990s, I learnt this early. Come
September, as the coffee season peaked, the Uganda shilling would firm almost
on cue. Exporters, flush with dollar earnings, would crowd the market
converting proceeds. The greenback would soften, the shilling would strengthen.
Then, as the season tapered off, the reverse would happen. The currency would
weaken, liquidity would tighten, and the cycle would repeat itself the
following year.
It was neat.
Predictable. And deeply revealing.
So predictable,
in fact, that speculators began to play the cycle—betting against the shilling
as the coffee season wound down. It got to the point where the then central
bank governor, Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile, famously warned that anyone trying
to game the market would have their “fingers burnt.”
That warning
captured the moment: a shallow foreign exchange market, dominated by a single
commodity, and prone to seasonal swings that could be read like a script.
"Uganda was, in
effect, a one-crop economy with a currency that danced to the rhythm of a
single harvest...
That rhythm has
largely faded.
The newly
released Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) export statistics tell the
story—not loudly, but unmistakably. In 1996, Uganda’s total exports stood at $711 million, and coffee alone brought
in about $410 million—a
commanding 58% of total exports.
Everything else—fish, cotton, tea—was a distant supporting cast.
Gold, at the
time, was almost an afterthought—bringing in just $52 million, or about 7%
of exports.
Fast forward to
2025, and the scale—and structure—of exports has changed dramatically. Total
exports have surged to about $13.7
billion. Coffee earnings have risen to roughly $2.5 billion, but their share has declined to about 18% of total exports.
And gold?
Gold has gone
from the margins to the centre. Export earnings have jumped to about $6.4 billion, accounting for roughly 47% of total exports.
That single shift
explains much of what has happened.
What this has
done, quietly, is to change the character of the foreign exchange market.
Export inflows no longer arrive in one seasonal surge tied to coffee. They come
in waves—gold, agriculture, regional trade—smoothing what was once a highly
predictable cycle.
The old September
effect on the shilling has been diluted, if not entirely erased.
In short, Uganda has moved from a single harvest economy to a portfolio of exports—albeit one still heavily tilted in a different direction...
Back in 2014,
when Ricardo Hausmann and his co-authors released their study How Should
Uganda Grow?, it did not remain confined to academic circles. Hausmann
himself came to Kampala soon after, making the case that Uganda’s future lay
not in producing more coffee, but in producing new things altogether.
The diagnosis was
stark. Uganda’s export basket was dominated by primary commodities—coffee,
fish, tobacco—accounting for roughly 85% of exports. The country produced what
many others produced, with little in the way of sophistication.
Even then, there
were early signs of movement. The study pointed to diversification into fish,
flowers, and construction materials for neighbouring markets. Uganda, in
Hausmann’s “product space,” was beginning to shift—tentatively, but
perceptibly.
A decade later,
that shift has broadened—and deepened.
And nowhere is
this more evident than in something that barely featured in the export
conversation back then: power.
In the 1990s,
Uganda was a power-deficit economy. Load shedding was routine, industrial
growth constrained, and the idea of exporting electricity would have seemed
fanciful. Today, Uganda exports power to Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan and eastern
DRC. What began as surplus from new generation capacity—Bujagali, Isimba,
Karuma has evolved into a modest but growing regional trade.
It may not yet
rival coffee or gold in value, but it is qualitatively different.
Power exports are
not about what lies in the ground or grows on trees. They are about
infrastructure, planning, and coordination. They require transmission lines,
cross-border agreements, and regulatory frameworks. In Hausmann’s language,
they represent a thicker set of capabilities—more letters in the scrabble set.
And they point to
something else: the rise of regional
opportunity.
The study hinted
at this when it noted that regional markets, South Sudan in particular, were
beginning to demand not just food, but construction materials and basic
manufactures. That demand has since expanded. Uganda is now exporting cement,
steel, processed foods—and increasingly, electricity into a region that is
urbanising, rebuilding, and growing.
In effect, Uganda has become not just a producer, but a regional economic platform...
But before we get
carried away, a note of caution.
This is
diversification, yes—but of a particular kind.
Coffee’s
dominance has been diluted, but replaced more decisively than we often admit, by
gold. And gold, as Hausmann would remind us, is not complex. Its value lies in
geology, not in accumulated knowledge. In that sense, Uganda has traded one
form of dependence for another—arguably a larger and more volatile one.
Similarly, much
of the export expansion remains in what economists call the
“periphery”—agriculture, food processing, and basic manufacturing. The study
was clear: Uganda had made limited inroads into more complex sectors such as
machinery and chemicals. That observation still largely holds.
And yet,
something important has changed.
Uganda is
accumulating capabilities. The ability to produce cement, export electricity,
or serve regional markets reflects learning—incremental, but real. And in the
Hausmann world, learning is everything. What a country produces today
determines what it can produce tomorrow.
That is why this
moment matters.
"Uganda has moved beyond dependence, but it has not yet reached complexity. It sits somewhere in between—diversified, but not transformed...
The study
outlined two paths forward. One was “parsimonious transformation”—building on
existing strengths like agro-processing. The other was “strategic bets”—pushing
into more complex industries.
Power exports sit
neatly between the two—an extension of existing capability, but also a gateway
to more complex regional integration.
And then there is
oil.
A decade ago,
Hausmann warned that oil could finance diversification or undermine it. As
Uganda edges closer to first oil, that warning feels less theoretical and more
immediate.
Because if there
is one lesson from the journey from 1996 to today, it is this: diversification
is not an event; it is a process.
The disappearance
of the coffee-driven exchange rate cycle is one signal.
The rise of gold
is another—more dominant than we expected.
The emergence of
power exports is perhaps the most telling.
Small shifts,
individually. But together, they suggest an economy that is learning to stand
on more than one leg.
The question now is whether it can learn to run.
