Uganda: What I Know and What the Place Actually Is
Uganda does not get talked about the way some African countries do when people discuss gold. That is changing. It has been changing for a few years and the pace of it is picking up. If you work in this sector and you are not paying attention to Uganda you will be behind the curve before long.
The country sits on an estimated 31 million tonnes of gold ore. There was a large-scale discovery that made headlines and the numbers involved are substantial enough that they get dismissed as exaggeration until you look into it properly. The gold is spread across several regions. Karamoja in the northeast. Mubende in the centre. Busia in the east, which is where the Wagagai mine opened in August 2025, Uganda's first proper industrial-scale gold operation, a Chinese-backed facility processing thousands of tonnes of ore daily. The sector is formalising quickly and the government is pushing hard behind it. Gold overtook coffee as Uganda's leading export, which tells you something about how fast things are moving.
All of that is context. What it means on the ground for someone doing what I do is a different conversation.
Uganda's security sector is heavily regulated and has been getting more so. The Firearms Act has been on the books since 1970, amended in 2006, and the framework it creates treats firearm ownership as a tightly controlled privilege rather than a right. Licences are issued annually on a discretionary basis by senior police and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In late 2024 the government put a halt on new private firearm licences as part of a broader clampdown on proliferation. Then in 2025 new legislation came in restricting pistols to military use only and widening the state's jurisdiction over illegal possession. The direction of travel is clear and anyone operating there needs to be current on it, because the landscape shifts.
For foreign contractors the position is specific. Private security organisations in Uganda are not permitted to employ non-Ugandans without the express permission of the Inspector General of Police. That permission exists and it gets granted, but it is not automatic and it is not casual. The paperwork matters, the vetting matters, and the relationship with the licensed firm you are operating under matters enormously. You are not a freelancer walking in off the street. You are embedded within a structure that carries legal responsibility for your presence and your conduct. That structure has to be solid before you get on a plane.
The Karamoja region is worth a specific mention because it comes up regularly in the context of gold security work. It is in the northeast, bordering South Sudan and Kenya, and it has a history of instability connected to armed pastoralist communities and the movement of illegal weapons across borders. The gold deposits there have attracted attention from legitimate operators and from others who are less legitimate. It is not a straightforward operating environment and the people who treat it as one tend to find that out the hard way.
Mubende, in the central region, has had its own issues. There have been incidents involving illegal artisanal miners, disputes over land and access, and the kind of low-level but persistent insecurity that characterises areas where significant mineral value sits alongside under-resourced oversight. The formalisation of the sector helps with this over time but formalisation takes time and in the meantime the gap between what is on paper and what is on the ground remains real.
The climate in Uganda varies by region but the operational areas I have described are not gentle. Heat, humidity in some parts, red dust that gets into everything in others, roads that are adequate in the dry season and significantly less so in the wet. Kampala is a functional city with reasonable infrastructure by regional standards. Get two hours outside it and the picture changes fairly quickly.
What Uganda has, which not every operating environment does, is a government that is engaged with the gold sector and wants it to succeed. That political will translates into a degree of institutional support that is not always present elsewhere. It does not eliminate risk. Nothing eliminates risk. But it changes the character of it, and that matters when you are making assessments about how a deployment is likely to go.
I will leave it there for now. More when I can put it down.
Ollie