Increment in funding to the sports sector is a cry that has existed for far too long. Uganda has over 70 percent of its population made up of youths below 30 years of age.
While the government continues to prioritise sectors such as agriculture, information technology, and manufacturing, young people remain naturally and irresistibly drawn to areas like sports and entertainment.
A notable recent development is the significant increase in funding to the sports sector, largely driven by the need to successfully host the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON).
Hundreds of billions of Uganda shillings are being spent on new sports infrastructure, including the Hoima City Stadium, as well as the renovation and upgrade of existing facilities such as Namboole. Credit should go to the National Council of Sports (NCS) for leveraging the AFCON opportunity to also establish a world class indoor sports arena in Hoima.
The question that must be asked is why it took AFCON to convince the government to invest more in a sector that already appeals to the majority of Ugandans. It is also important to ask what will happen to this level of funding once AFCON is over. Another concern is why most of the investment is directed towards infrastructure while national sports federations remain underfunded.
If the aim is to ensure that these facilities are fully utilised, then neglecting federations could prove costly. Coaches and athletes fall under these federations, and without adequate funding, the infrastructure risks being underused. This brings back the long standing debate on whether human resource development should take priority over infrastructure, or whether both can be developed simultaneously.
With over 70 percent of Uganda’s population being youth, the sports sector, through NCS, has a responsibility to help address the challenge of idle young people. Their time, energy, and aspirations should be channelled into productive and positive activities such as sports. This is not just a development issue, but also one of national security.
One of the major barriers to increased investment in sports has been the way the sector justifies its funding needs to Parliament and the Executive. For a long time, some of us have argued that presenting medals won during the year is not sufficient to secure higher budget allocations. Medals, in financial terms, have little direct value, yet the country spends significant resources to obtain them.
In 2024, I travelled with Uganda’s national table tennis team to Ethiopia for the Africa Senior Championships. The team won a bronze medal at a total cost of over Uganda shillings 70 million. The medal itself holds no direct financial value. However, not all the expenditure occurred outside the country. About Uganda shillings 20 million was spent locally.
In the same year, the Uganda Table Tennis Association received approximately Uganda shillings 124 million in remittances from the International Table Tennis Federation and participating countries during the Regional Senior Championships hosted in Kampala. This meant that about Uganda shillings 144 million was injected into the Ugandan economy, while only about Uganda shillings 50 million was spent outside the country on table tennis activities.
This resulted in a net benefit of approximately Uganda shillings 90 million to Uganda. Such statistics provide a stronger and more compelling case to both Parliament and Cabinet for increased investment in sports. If similar data is collected across all sports federations, it becomes easier to demonstrate the sector’s net economic contribution. These insights can also help identify where investment would generate the highest returns.
There is a need for NCS to urgently roll out a comprehensive data collection exercise across all national sports federations to gather this kind of information and more. Evidence based statistics will strengthen the case that the sports sector is financially beneficial and deserves increased funding to drive further growth.
It is time to present sports funding as an investment rather than expenditure. Government and taxpayers should be viewed as investors expecting returns. Even if government is slow to adopt this perspective, private investors are far more likely to respond to clear, data driven evidence of profitability.
The writer is a Bush Lawyer, former President of the Uganda Table Tennis Association, Secretary General of the Union of Uganda Sports Federations and Associations, and a Board Member of the Uganda Olympic Committee.
