Uganda’s Access to Global and Regional Markets

As a landlocked country in East Africa, Uganda faces two major disadvantages concerning access to foreign markets. It does not have an immediate gateway to low-cost ocean transport, but first has to pass its imports and exports through neighboring countries by road or rail. Nor does it share a common border with an industrialized country that produces the goods and services that Uganda imports and that could absorb a large share of the country’s exports. In this context it is all the more important to fully exploit existing opportunities in regional and global markets, as well as opening new export markets by negotiating trade barrier reductions on a preferential or multilateral basis. These trade barrier-related aspects of regional and global market access are analyzed in this paper. In particular, the discussion reviews market access policy in Uganda and identifies a number of key issues and challenges for the country.