Agriculture
For decades, Uganda's agricultural export story has followed a frustrating script: farmers grow it, traders truck it out raw, and someone else — a roaster in Europe, a processor in the Gulf, a factory in Kenya — captures the value that comes from turning coffee cherries into ground beans, raw hides into finished leather, or live cattle into chilled, packaged meat. The Presidential Advisory Committee on Exports and Industrial Development (PACEID) says it has a fix, and it has spent the first two weeks of August taking that fix on the road to the farmers who would host it.
At a sensitisation meeting held at Kamugasha Mixed Farm in Mbarara City, PACEID officials, journalists and local leaders from western Uganda gathered to discuss what the agency is calling Regional Aggregation Centres, or RACs — a network of farm-gate hubs intended to bundle processing, storage, quality assurance and export logistics into single locations close to where crops and livestock are actually produced. PACEID chairperson Odrek Rwabwogo, presenting the model, argued that Uganda's entire export strategy has been built backwards. "Uganda cannot export at scale without organised production, efficient processing and reliable logistics. Regional Aggregation Centres provide the missing link by bringing these services closer to farmers and producers," he told the gathering.
Eighteen Hubs, One Strategy
The RAC push forms the centrepiece of what PACEID calls its "PACEID 2.0" strategy. Rwabwogo has said the agency intends to establish 18 aggregation centres across the country, with district councils in Ibanda, Kisoro, Tororo, Mbale and Gulu among those that have already offered land for the project, alongside other locations still being finalised. Each centre is designed to function as a collection point where smallholder produce — too small in volume for any individual farmer to interest an international buyer — can be pooled, sorted, dried, chilled, inspected and packaged to meet export-grade standards before being moved onward.
The logic addresses a problem that has surfaced repeatedly in Uganda's recent trade record. Avocado exporters have reported rejection rates as high as 70 percent at the farm gate over quality inconsistencies; coffee traders have had to scramble to meet European Union deforestation-traceability rules; and government officials touting new markets in the Gulf have simultaneously acknowledged a stark trade imbalance — Uganda's agricultural exports to Saudi Arabia, for instance, were recently put at just over $9 million against more than $149 million in imports from the kingdom. In each case, the underlying constraint is less about what Uganda can grow and more about what it can consistently process, certify and deliver at scale. RACs are PACEID's answer to that constraint: rather than one flagship factory serving an entire region, a distributed network of smaller hubs feeding produce into the export pipeline at the point of harvest.
Why Western Uganda, Why Livestock First
The choice of Mbarara for the sensitisation drive was deliberate. Rwabwogo said western Uganda's economy already leans heavily on beef, dairy, coffee and bananas, but much of that value is currently lost because commodities are sold raw rather than processed near the farm. "For western Uganda, RACs mean unlocking greater value from our beef, dairy, coffee, bananas and other products. This will create jobs, increase household incomes and improve Uganda's competitiveness in international markets," he said.
Livestock featured prominently in his pitch. Transporting live animals long distances to Kampala for slaughter, he argued, drives up costs, stresses the animals and ultimately degrades meat quality by the time it reaches a buyer — whether that buyer is a domestic supermarket or, increasingly, an export market in the Middle East. "Processing livestock where it is produced eliminates many of these inefficiencies, increases farmers' profits and improves the quality of meat destined for export markets," Rwabwogo said. Under the RAC model, slaughter, chilling and packaging would happen close to the ranch rather than after a multi-hour road journey — a shift that mirrors complaints already raised elsewhere in Uganda's meat-export ambitions, where cold-chain gaps have been cited as a recurring bottleneck to reaching premium markets.
Jobs Beyond the Farm Gate
PACEID is framing the initiative as much as a jobs programme as an export strategy. Rwabwogo said each centre could support employment for farmers, transporters, veterinarians, processors, warehouse operators, exporters, ICT specialists, mechanics and accountants, describing a single Regional Aggregation Centre as capable of supporting "thousands of direct and indirect jobs while stimulating local enterprise development throughout the region." Beyond livestock and dairy, the model is intended to eventually cover coffee, bananas, grains, poultry, fish, fruits, vegetables, tea, vanilla, cocoa and sugar — effectively every major segment of Uganda's agricultural export basket.
Local leaders at the Mbarara meeting welcomed the framing, particularly its appeal to youth employment. Ibanda District Chairperson Happy Herbert Mayanja called the timing right: "This Regional Aggregation Centre initiative comes at the right time. If implemented successfully, it will create employment opportunities for many young people while increasing incomes for farmers and strengthening our local economy."
Journalists as a Deliberate Audience
Notably, PACEID structured the Mbarara event specifically around journalists and local leaders rather than farmers alone — a signal that the agency sees public understanding, not just infrastructure, as a constraint on the RAC rollout. "We want journalists to report based on facts and help communities understand how Regional Aggregation Centres work because informed communities make better economic decisions," Rwabwogo said, adding that the goal was to equip reporters to accurately explain the concept so it does not get lost — or distorted — by the time it reaches the villages expected to host or supply the centres.
The Execution Question
PACEID was created by President Museveni in 2022 specifically to identify export opportunities, remove barriers to trade and coordinate government agencies and private investors around industrialisation. Its RAC plan lands in a crowded field of recent agro-industrial announcements — from the China-backed agricultural park in Luwero, to the NSSF-UAE food production hub, to the expansion of the Soroti Fruit Factory — all of which promise similar outcomes of value addition, jobs and export growth. What distinguishes the RAC model on paper is scale and proximity: rather than concentrating investment in a handful of flagship mega-projects, it proposes a distributed grid of smaller, farmer-adjacent facilities designed to plug directly into existing production zones.
Whether that distinction survives contact with implementation — financing, land titling, staffing 18 separate facilities with veterinarians and quality inspectors, and building the cold-chain logistics to link them to ports and airports — remains the open question. For now, PACEID's task is persuasion: convincing district councils to release land, convincing farmers that aggregation will raise their prices rather than simply add another middleman, and convincing the journalists in the room in Mbarara that this iteration of Uganda's value-addition promise is the one that will actually reach the farm gate.
