Kampala: City report

Working Paper 25

Paul Isolo Mukwaya, Judith Mbabazi and Henrik Ernstson

February 2025

Abstract

This paper draws on the ACRC’s holistic framework components – politics, systems and development domains – to analyse urban development in Kampala City. We model how power is configured at the national and city levels, and then analyse how these configurations of power shape (and are shaped by) urban development processes in the city. The systems component analyses the functioning of the key systems that sustain and/or improve urban life in the city. The domains component looks at some of the distinct fields of discourse, policy and practice that have formed around complex, intersystemic development challenges in the city, and analyses how the actors (political, bureaucratic, professional and popular) engaged in these fields collaborate and/or compete for authority. The paper shows that national and city-level politics, urban systems and particular configurations of actors, agencies, ideas and practices have shaped development in the domains. And yet, urban developmental problems that particularly affect marginalised groups persist, considering that access to essential services, including safe drinking water, safely managed sanitation, healthy diets, affordable, reliable and safe electricity supply, adequate waste collection systems, cooking fuels, adequate transportation, and so on, are inadequate. Private formal and informal actors are filling the many gaps in centralised systems, resulting in complex formal–informal modes of delivery that rarely offer reliable and affordable services. Indeed, urban life in Kampala typically survives and endures in the “alternatives” and the dysfunctionality of institutional models explains the rise in local electricity power connectors (commonly referred to as Kamyufus), village health teams (VHTs), gulper technologies, waste pickers, water vendors, and so on. Political authority in Kampala City has become highly fragmented, with a myriad of power centres emerging, and this undermines prospects for ambitious reform programmes or coordinated action by political and bureaucratic actors. The existing politicised city culture, and sharp interest politics, including political manoeuvres like recentralising the functioning of Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) directly under the President’s Office, have not helped either, except to entrench deep-seated corruption and a culture of patronage, woven into the fabric of the state. Finally, KCCA lies in a complicated and manipulative national landscape that has created an institutional landscape geared towards enhancing short-term political gains, while compromising long-term focus on service quality, relationships and efficiency across all systems.

Keywords

City systems, domains, informality, Kampala, Uganda