A dialogue, and a demand
A Halal Business Dialogue convened in Kampala this week by the Islamic Chamber of Commerce and the Uganda Halal Bureau ended with a message aimed squarely at government: strengthen the laws and policies governing halal trade, or watch a very large export opportunity pass Uganda by.
The room brought together traders, legal experts, business leaders and policymakers. Zackey Kalega, Commissioner for National Trade, told participants the government was working to take advantage of the opportunity while ensuring compliance. "Government needs to take advantage of the opportunities in the Halal market while ensuring that products produced and traded meet the required standards," he said.
Akram Moses, spokesperson for the Halal Bureau, framed the bureau's role in enforcement terms. "Our role is to ensure that products on the market comply with the required Halal standards and regulations. We will continue verifying products to protect consumer confidence and promote Halal trade," he said. Participants called for stronger regulation and verification of goods marketed as halal, and for closer cooperation between government and the private sector.
This is the kind of dialogue that usually produces a communiqué and little else. It deserves more attention, for a specific reason: Uganda has now had the same conversation about halal exports three times in five months, and the technical diagnosis each time has been blunter than the language at the podium suggests.
What the earlier meetings actually said
In April, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Export and Industrial Development convened a Kampala meeting on halal beef, bringing in Uganda National Accreditation Services, the Ministry of Agriculture's veterinary services, the Halal Certification Bureau of the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council and an Ethiopian investment delegation. The framing there was that Uganda's problem is not livestock numbers.
"Uganda's challenge is no longer livestock numbers, but the quality and consistency required by export markets," Dr Higenyi James told that meeting. "We must shift towards structured production systems, particularly feedlots, improved genetics, and localized infrastructure, to ensure we can reliably supply export-grade animals." Dr Richard Musafiri of UGANAS put the accreditation question plainly: "For Uganda to compete internationally, our certification systems must be trusted globally. Accreditation is the backbone that gives confidence to importing countries."
Hajji Issa Shaban made the commercial point the sector's advocates now lead with: "Halal certification is not just a religious requirement; it is a market access tool." And Dawit Hairu Defar, representing Ethiopian investment firms with existing Gulf market access, said he was interested in sourcing beef and goat meat from Uganda — a revealing offer, since it implies Uganda supplying animals into someone else's certified chain rather than running its own.
Then in July, at an Islamic Chamber of Commerce and Industry Uganda business dialogue at the Uganda Investment Authority auditorium, Dr Ahmed Kaweesa Ssengendo, Assistant Secretary General for Economic Affairs at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, delivered the sentence that ought to be the headline of the whole exercise. "Our abattoirs, by and large, do not meet the halal standards," he said.
That is the audit. Everything else — the trade missions, the certification bodies, the market-size arithmetic — sits downstream of it.
The size of the prize, and the size of the gap
The numbers on either side of that gap are worth setting out together, because the contrast is stark.
On the demand side: the global halal market is estimated at more than US$3 trillion, and has long since stopped being only about food, now spanning finance, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, tourism and logistics. Many Muslim-majority countries import a large share of their food from non-Muslim countries — exactly the space a certified African supplier could occupy. Uganda has the raw agricultural base, and a climate Ssengendo noted also favours organic halal production, another premium segment.
On the supply side: Uganda's exports of meat and edible meat offal were worth about US$5.03 million in 2024, according to UN COMTRADE data. That is not a share of a trillion-dollar market in any meaningful sense. Uganda's total merchandise exports to Saudi Arabia — the largest halal food importer on earth — were around US$9.11 million against imports of US$149.15 million, and beef has been banned from that market for roughly a quarter of a century over failures to meet international sanitary and phytosanitary requirements.
There have been real openings. A Ugandan processor has been shipping value-added beef to Egypt at around 300 tonnes a month since 2023, and this July Uganda flagged off its first export of processed meat to Ethiopia. But these are individual firms clearing individual gates, not a national export system.
Why the abattoir is the choke point
Halal certification for meat is not a label applied at the border. It is a claim about a process running from the animal's feed and handling through the slaughter itself, the separation of the line from non-halal product, the stunning method if any, and the traceability of the carcass afterwards. An importing country's certifier does not audit a certificate. It audits a facility.
That is why Ssengendo's observation matters more than any policy paper. Uganda can pass halal legislation, accredit certification bodies through UGANAS, and mount trade missions to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE — the Islamic Chamber announced exactly such a mission for August, ahead of a Regional Islamic Trade and Halal Conference slated for October. None of it converts into shipments if the plant an inspector walks into cannot pass.
And the plant is only as good as what arrives at its gate. This is where Uganda's halal ambition collides with the year the cattle corridor has actually had. Foot-and-mouth disease quarantines shut livestock markets for months at a time — Ntungamo's ran for eight months before being lifted in August, with nine farms still active; Kazo's ran nearly two. Anthrax and drought cut daily milk collection in Mbarara from around 20,000 litres to between 5,000 and 8,000, and beef retail prices climbed to Shs18,000–20,000 a kilo on the back of that scarcity.
An export market requires reliable volume of a consistent grade on a contracted schedule. A herd that cannot move between districts for eight months at a stretch cannot deliver that. This is not a halal problem; it is an animal health and traceability problem that a halal certificate sits on top of. The National Livestock Identification and Traceability Act exists partly to address it. Implementation is the open question.
The regulatory moment
There is, however, a genuine reason this push is arriving now. Uganda is in the middle of the largest overhaul of its food and agricultural regulation in decades. The Food and Agriculture Regulatory Authority Bill 2026, given its first reading on 25 August, would merge a scattered set of regulators into a single authority covering residue monitoring, veterinary medicines and food safety. New fisheries regulations carry a 15 September licensing deadline. Nine agrochemicals are being withdrawn by year-end. The country is already rebuilding the compliance architecture that halal certification depends on.
The halal sector's ask — stronger regulation, credible verification, an end to unverified halal claims on the domestic shelf — is therefore well timed. It is also a rare instance of an industry lobbying to be regulated more tightly rather than less, because in this market a certificate is only worth what the enforcement behind it is worth. A halal mark Ugandan traders can obtain easily is a halal mark Gulf importers will discount to zero.
Professor Khadijah Nakyinsige of Kyambogo University made the argument that most usefully widens the frame. "Halal is not for Muslims," she said at the July dialogue. "Halal is for everyone who loves good because halal means good quality. It means safe products. It means products that conform to quality standards." She urged universities to build halal training into food science, laboratory technology, tourism, logistics and finance programmes.
Read that way, halal compliance stops being a niche religious certification and becomes a proxy for something Uganda needs regardless of destination: clean, traceable, auditable food processing. The abattoir upgrade that satisfies a Gulf halal inspector also satisfies a European sanitary auditor; the traceability system that serves it also serves the grain sector's aflatoxin problem. The investment is not market-specific; only the certificate is.
What to watch
The honest assessment is that Uganda is at the beginning of this, not the middle. Three things will indicate whether the current push is different from the last one.
First, capital expenditure on abattoirs and cold chain. Talk of feedlots and processing infrastructure has been in every communiqué since April; the test is whether a financed, export-grade facility breaks ground. Second, whether an importing country's authority — not a domestic bureau — accredits a Ugandan plant. Ethiopia's willingness to source Ugandan animals into its own certified chain signals that Uganda is currently valued as a supplier of livestock, not of certified product, and the gap between those two roles is where nearly all the margin sits. Third, whether October's Regional Islamic Trade and Halal Conference produces contracts with volumes and dates attached, or another set of resolutions.
For farmers in the cattle corridor, the calculation is simpler and slower. A functioning halal export channel would put a price floor under animals that currently move through informal markets at whatever the local butcher will pay. But it arrives, if it arrives, on the far side of vaccination coverage, movement permits, traceability tags and a slaughterhouse a foreign inspector will sign off on — and not one of those is a matter of regulation alone.
