On paper, Uganda has never looked richer. Exports are at record levels, coffee is booming, and gold has made Kampala one of the continent's busiest trading points. But in August 2026 the country posted the worst monthly trade gap in its history: a goods deficit of $817 million, driven by imports of mineral products other than petroleum more than doubling. It was the largest monthly gap since records began in 1993.
So which is it: export miracle or import addiction? The honest answer is both, and the story behind them is gold.
The Deficit: Two Numbers, Two Stories
There are two ways to measure Uganda's trade gap, and they tell opposite stories.
- With gold included, things look better. For FY2025/26, the goods deficit narrowed to $2.1 billion from $2.5 billion, as gold trade swung from a $127.5 million deficit to a $1.4 billion surplus.
- With gold removed, things look much worse. The deficit widened by 46% to $3.4 billion from $2.3 billion.
The import bill is climbing fast. From July 2025 to May 2026, imports totalled $15.9 billion, up 20.4% on the $13.2 billion recorded a year earlier. The main drivers were machinery and equipment, vehicles, gold, petroleum products, plastics and rubber.
August showed how much gold now drives the picture. Gold exports rose to $889 million, or nearly 60% of all exports, while exports excluding gold actually fell to $603 million. Over the past year, imports have grown about 61% and exports about 41%.
The takeaway: take gold out, and Uganda is a country buying far more than it produces, with the gap growing.
Where the Imports Come From
The biggest surprise is that Uganda's top supplier is no longer China. Tanzania has overtaken it, driven mainly by a sharp rise in imports of gold and precious minerals. In 2024/25, Tanzania supplied about 22% of all Uganda's imports, and imports from Tanzania grew by more than 1,000% between 2022 and 2025.
The wider supplier picture for 2023:
| Source | Value |
|---|---|
| China | $2.29B |
| UAE | $1.43B |
| Tanzania | $1.33B |
| India | $1.26B |
| Kenya | $824M |
| Japan | $449M |
| Saudi Arabia | $416M |
Total imports that year were $11.78 billion, with a trade deficit of $5.48 billion.
What Uganda is buying:
- Gold and precious minerals. These made up 29% of total imports in 2024/25.
- Fuel. Mineral fuels and oils were the largest single category in 2023 at $2.12 billion.
- Manufactured goods from China. Phones and telephony equipment, polymers, hot-rolled iron, machinery parts and insecticides.
- Medicines and vehicles from India. India supplies pharmaceuticals, textiles and vehicles, while the UAE's role is largely re-exports and fuel-related products.
- Staple foods. Uganda imports 95% of the wheat it needs, at a cost of over $121 million a year and rising. Rice imports reached $125 million in 2023, with 95% coming from Tanzania.
That last point should worry anyone in agribusiness. A country with Uganda's soils and rainfall should not be importing staples it could grow and mill itself.
Within the East African Community, the pattern is the same. In June 2025 Uganda ran a $129 million deficit with Kenya, importing $189 million of goods against $60 million of exports. In one quarter of FY2024/25, Uganda imported $551 million from Tanzania, mostly gold, against exports of just $54 million.
Where the Exports Go
Total exports reached $12.7 billion in the year to November 2025, up 33% from $8.5 billion the previous year.
The gold destinations. The UAE takes most of Uganda's gold, with Hong Kong now the second-largest buyer, mostly of re-exported gold. Italy is the anchor market for coffee, with Kenya, DRC and South Sudan the other major destinations.
Uganda's leading export markets (year to June 2023):
| Market | Value | Share |
|---|---|---|
| UAE | $2.03B | 25.7% |
| India | $951.8M | 12.9% |
| Kenya | $626.7M | 8.5% |
| South Sudan | $534.5M | 7.3% |
| Italy | $467.6M | 6.3% |
| DR Congo | $429M | 5.8% |
| Hong Kong | $349.1M | 4.7% |
| Rwanda | $306.1M | 4.2% |
What Uganda is selling:
- Gold. Gold exports rose 76% to $5.8 billion over 12 months, mostly because of higher world prices, making gold the country's top export ahead of coffee.
- Coffee. From March 2025 to February 2026, coffee exports reached 8.8 million bags worth $2.5 billion, up from 6.3 million bags worth $1.6 billion the year before.
- Tourism. Tourism earned $1.7 billion in FY2024/25.
- Regional trade. Uganda earns surpluses selling food and manufactured goods into its neighbours, particularly DRC, South Sudan and Rwanda.
The Gold Problem Nobody Wants to Discuss
Here is the uncomfortable part. Much of Uganda's gold is not Ugandan. Gold comes in from DR Congo, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and South Sudan, some of it unrefined, and is refined in Uganda and re-exported. Higher gold prices in 2025 only strengthened Uganda's role as a regional processing and re-export hub.
There are also questions about who is behind the trade. International media have reported that nearly half of Uganda's gold exports come from a single firm linked to a sanctioned network.
The Bank of Uganda is trying to change this with a plan to buy gold locally, aiming to raise the country's earnings from gold and reduce reliance on re-exports.
The point for investors: gold flatters the export figures, but a re-export margin is thin. The real value stays with whoever mines the gold and whoever buys it in Dubai and Hong Kong.
The Value-Add Opportunity
If gold is the illusion, agriculture is the real opportunity. Four areas stand out.
1. Coffee: stop shipping beans, start shipping brands. Uganda exports more than 98% of its coffee as green beans. Italy and Germany then roast it, brand it and sell it to the world at many times the price. The government says it wants a gradual shift toward roasted and soluble coffee. The scale is big: 8.8 million bags is about 528,000 tonnes. Roasting even 10% of that in Uganda would mean over 50,000 tonnes of finished product made at origin, with the jobs, packaging and brand value that come with it.
2. Grains and milling: replace imports. Over $121 million spent on wheat and $125 million on rice each year is a ready-made market for local farmers, millers and processors. Import substitution here also cuts the deficit directly.
3. Gold: refine, certify, keep. If Uganda is going to be a gold hub, it needs to capture more of the value through domestic refining, traceability, certification and central bank reserves, rather than earning a thin trading margin.
4. Regional processing: feed the neighbours. Uganda already runs surpluses with DRC, South Sudan and Rwanda. Processed foods, dairy, edible oils and packaged goods for those markets are a natural next step.
The Questions Uganda Needs to Answer
- Is Uganda really an exporter, or just a very busy trading post? If most gold is mined elsewhere, how much of the "record export boom" is actually Ugandan production?
- Why is Africa's top coffee exporter letting Italy capture the value of its own crop? After decades of talk about value addition, why is 98% still shipped green?
- How can a country this fertile spend over $240 million a year importing rice and wheat? Is this a farming failure, a policy failure, or a choice that suits certain importers?
- Is the gold trade a national asset or a reputational risk? If reports linking major exporters to sanctioned networks are accurate, what happens to Uganda's access to Western finance and markets?
- Is the East African Community working for Uganda? Uganda runs large deficits with Kenya and Tanzania. Is regional integration a partnership or a one-way market for its neighbours?
- What happens when the gold price falls? The headline deficit improved only because gold prices soared. Without that, the hole is $3.4 billion and growing.
- When oil starts flowing, will Uganda repeat the gold mistake? Will crude be exported raw, or will Uganda finally build the refining and processing capacity to keep the value at home?
The Brew Brief Verdict
Uganda's export numbers are real, but they are not what they seem. Gold has painted over a widening structural deficit, while coffee, Uganda's genuine homegrown success, still leaves the country mostly as raw beans.
The opportunity is clear for investors willing to build rather than trade: roasting and soluble coffee at origin, grain milling, edible oils, and regional food processing. Uganda does not need more trading. It needs more factories.
The question is whether Kampala, and the investors watching it, will see past the glitter.
Africa Brew Brief is an investigative editorial series from Africa One Media, covering African agribusiness, trade and value chains.
