Uganda's technology regulators, telecoms, banks and police spent two days in mid-August at Kampala's Sheraton Hotel confronting an uncomfortable statistic: cybercrime in the country has nearly doubled in three years, and the systems meant to catch it are struggling to keep pace with a digital economy that is expanding faster than the institutions built to secure it. The inaugural National Cybersecurity Conference, held August 11-12 under the theme "Securing Uganda's Digital Future: Collaboration, Resilience and Trust," was organized by the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) through its Computer Emergency Response Team (UgCERT), in partnership with the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, and marked the first time Uganda has convened a dedicated national forum specifically on cybersecurity — a belated but pointed acknowledgment that the country's rapid embrace of mobile money, e-government services and satellite internet has outrun its defenses.
The numbers driving the urgency are stark. Reported cybercrime cases in Uganda rose more than 93 percent between 2023 and 2024, from 245 to 474, according to figures cited at the conference, before easing slightly to 412 in 2025 — still nearly double the 2023 baseline. The Bank of Uganda has found that more than half of all reported cybercrime now involves digital financial fraud, concentrated in mobile banking and electronic transactions, a particularly acute vulnerability given that Uganda counted 37.8 million active mobile money subscriptions as of June 2026 in a country of roughly 48 million people. Bank of Uganda Governor Dr. Michael Atingi-Ego, who delivered the conference's keynote address, warned that the growing interconnection between banks, telecom operators and payment platforms means a security failure in any one part of the financial system can now cascade quickly through the others, threatening not just individual consumers but broader financial stability.
Law enforcement data presented separately this year offers a window into who is behind some of the more organized schemes. Ugandan authorities arrested and deported at least 115 foreign nationals — primarily from China and Nigeria — during the first half of 2026 over alleged involvement in cyber-enabled crime, including a single operation in July that saw roughly 1,000 Chinese nationals arrested on suspicion of running cyber fraud operations from Ugandan soil, part of a pattern seen elsewhere in East and Southern Africa in recent years involving transnational scam compounds. A separate group of roughly 50 Nigerian nationals was arrested during the same period over alleged phone-based scam operations. Uganda's government has attributed part of the broader rise in attacks to the flip side of a genuine success story: the ICT sector has grown at roughly 4.5 percent, and as more Ugandans and Ugandan institutions move online, the attack surface available to criminals — foreign and domestic — grows correspondingly.
The conference itself was opened by Minister of State for ICT and National Guidance Joyce Nabbosa Ssebuggwawo, with UCC Executive Director Nyombi Thembo telling participants that cybersecurity needed to be treated as "a shared national responsibility" embedded directly into Uganda's digital transformation agenda rather than treated as a narrow technical afterthought. Thembo called specifically for stronger information-sharing mechanisms between government agencies and the private sector, more coordinated incident response protocols, greater executive-level accountability for cybersecurity failures within companies and government bodies, sustained investment in local cybersecurity talent, and continued attention to consumer protection as digital financial services expand into rural and lower-income populations that have historically been more vulnerable to fraud. The event drew participants from government ministries, the National Information Technology Authority (NITA-U), the Uganda Police Force, academia, civil society and the private technology sector, reflecting an attempt to build the kind of cross-sector coordination that officials say has been missing.
The conference followed, and was likely informed by, a separate initiative earlier in the month: a three-day training program that began August 10 in Jinja City, run jointly by NITA-U and the Uganda Digital Acceleration Project, in which more than 100 police officers were trained specifically in digital evidence collection, preservation and presentation — skills that officers have reportedly lacked as cybercrime cases have increasingly required forensic digital evidence rather than the physical evidence traditional policing has been built around. Uganda's National ICT Innovation Hub also used the cybersecurity conference as a platform to showcase homegrown security solutions developed by local firms and researchers, an effort officials framed as part of a broader push to build domestic cybersecurity capacity rather than relying solely on foreign vendors and consultants.
The timing of this new focus on cybersecurity coincides with a period of rapid change in Uganda's broader digital infrastructure. Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet service received an operating licence from the UCC in May 2026, becoming the 28th African market to approve the service, after the company had briefly been forced offline in Uganda in January over licensing disputes. Starlink's arrival is expected to intensify competition with incumbent telecom operators MTN and Airtel and to extend connectivity into rural areas that have historically lacked reliable broadband — but it also expands, in the view of security officials, the population of newly connected users and devices that could be targeted by fraud schemes, particularly those with limited prior exposure to digital financial services and correspondingly limited awareness of common scam tactics. NITA-U has separately continued rolling out its Digital Transformation Agenda, unveiling new e-government services this year as part of a push toward a more digitally administered state, and Uganda is scheduled to host the Digital Government Africa Summit in Kampala from October 6-7, 2026 — an event likely to keep cybersecurity, alongside digital inclusion, near the top of the national tech policy agenda through the rest of the year.
What officials and outside observers will be watching for now is follow-through: whether the coordination mechanisms discussed at the Sheraton translate into faster incident response and measurably lower fraud rates, or whether the conference proves to be primarily a signaling exercise ahead of the October Digital Government Africa Summit. Given that more than half of reported cybercrime is now financial in nature and that mobile money penetration continues to climb, the near-term test will likely come from the payments sector itself: whether banks, telecoms and mobile money providers implement the stronger information-sharing and executive accountability measures UCC's Thembo called for, and whether Uganda's cybercrime numbers for 2026 — due to be tallied at year's end — show the surge finally leveling off or continuing to climb alongside the country's expanding digital footprint.
