TECHNOLOGY
Uganda spent the first week of September making an unusually specific promise about technology. At the third National ICT Summit, held from 2 to 4 September at the National ICT Innovation Hub in Nakawa, government and industry gathered under a theme that doubled as an arithmetic problem: “From Connectivity to Intelligence — Leveraging AI, Digital Infrastructure and Innovation to Accelerate Uganda’s Ten-Fold Growth to a USD 500 Billion Economy by 2040.”
The summit, organised by the ICT Association of Uganda, was opened by Justine Kasule Lumumba, Minister for ICT and National Guidance, representing President Museveni. Her emphasis was on home-grown solutions rather than imported platforms, and on turning universities into genuine research and innovation centres rather than credential factories — a recurring complaint in Uganda’s technology sector, where graduate volume has not translated into a deep pool of employable engineers.
The arithmetic of ten-fold growth
The most useful contribution came from Dr Aminah Zawedde, permanent secretary at the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, who put a number on the ambition. Moving Uganda from an economy of roughly US$50 billion to US$500 billion by 2040 requires sustained annual growth of about 15 per cent — roughly two and a half times the 6.4 per cent the economy recorded in financial year 2025/26, and well above even the oil-boosted 10.2 per cent projected for 2026/27.
That figure is worth stating plainly because it clarifies what the ICT agenda is being asked to do. No African economy has sustained 15 per cent real growth for fourteen consecutive years. The target functions less as a forecast than as a direction of travel, and the honest question is not whether Uganda hits US$500 billion by 2040 but whether the digital investments being made now raise productivity enough to matter.
Dr Zawedde listed what has been delivered: aggregated procurement of government IT systems, which consolidates buying power and reduces duplicated spending across ministries; six regional ICT hubs intended to push innovation support beyond Kampala; and automation of business registration. These are unglamorous administrative reforms, and they are probably a better indicator of digital-government maturity than any summit declaration.
The infrastructure layer
Behind the rhetoric, Uganda’s digital infrastructure has moved measurably in the past two years. In April 2026 the National Information Technology Authority (NITA-U) launched the National IP Peering Exchange, which keeps domestic internet traffic inside the country instead of routing it through exchanges abroad. The practical effects are lower transit costs, reduced latency for locally hosted services, and a degree of resilience that Uganda notably lacked during the nationwide internet shutdown around the January election.
The Uganda Digital Acceleration Project, backed by World Bank financing, is meanwhile extending high-speed connectivity into unserved communities through a mix of infrastructure investment and policy reform. And the demand side has moved fast: Uganda had roughly 20 million smartphones in use by December 2025, up from 17.6 million only six months earlier — a rate of adoption that shifts what kinds of services can plausibly be delivered digitally.
On artificial intelligence specifically, the groundwork is regulatory as much as technical. A national AI landscape assessment was produced with the International Telecommunication Union, and the Ministry of ICT, the Uganda Communications Commission and NITA-U have been working towards Uganda’s first dedicated AI framework. Getting that sequencing right matters: a regulatory regime written before there is any domestic AI industry risks either strangling one or being irrelevant to it.
The delivery gap
The awkward context for all of this is that Uganda’s existing digital public systems are, in several visible cases, not working.
On 2 September — the same day the ICT summit opened — Parliament’s Committee on Physical Infrastructure launched an inquiry into the failure of the digital number plate programme. Daily production of plates under the Intelligent Transport Monitoring System had reportedly fallen from about 350 to 100 per day, creating a backlog that lawmakers estimate is costing the economy more than Shs4 billion every week, with vehicle importers and traders reporting severe stock shortages. The committee said it intended to complete its work within three weeks, questioning government agencies and the contracted Russian firm, Joint Stock Company Global Security, and to seek guidance from the President directly. The ITMS contract has been controversial since its inception, both over the contractor’s capacity and over the surveillance implications of a system that tracks vehicle movement.
A second example surfaced the same week: reporting that a staffing crisis at the National Identification and Registration Authority has left millions of printed national IDs undistributed. A national ID is the gateway credential for banking, SIM registration, social programmes and, increasingly, digital government services. If the identity layer does not function, very little of the rest can.
These are not arguments against the ICT strategy. They are arguments about where the binding constraint actually sits. Uganda’s digital problem in 2026 is less a shortage of ambition or even of fibre than a shortage of execution capacity in the agencies that operate the systems — procurement discipline, contractor oversight, staffing, and the ability to run a service at scale for years after the launch event.
Why it matters
Uganda is a young, rapidly urbanising, landlocked economy whose traditional exports are agricultural and whose newest export is a finite hydrocarbon. Digitally traded services are one of the few sectors where a landlocked position imposes no structural penalty, which makes the ICT agenda strategically sensible regardless of whether the US$500 billion figure is realistic.
It also matters for how oil revenue is used. If petroleum earnings finance connectivity, skills and the institutions that manage them, the two agendas reinforce one another. If they finance consumption, the digital strategy will remain a set of summit themes.
What to watch
Kampala hosts the Digital Government Africa Summit in October, which will put Uganda’s digital-government record in front of a continental audience — a useful external check on the claims made at Nakawa. The parliamentary number plate inquiry should report within roughly three weeks of its 2 September launch, and its handling of the ITMS contract will indicate how much appetite there is for enforcing accountability on a politically sensitive foreign contractor. And the AI framework is the one to track over the medium term: whether Uganda produces a workable, locally grounded regime, or imports a template written for a very different economy.
