Dear Uganda,

The Nile begins its journey to the Mediterranean in your country, and you have harnessed it. In September 2024 you commissioned the 600 megawatt Karuma hydropower plant, financed 15 percent by your government and 85 percent by the Export-Import Bank of China. Nine-tenths of the electricity you generate comes from renewable sources. Four in five hectares of your land are farmed.

You have made real progress on income: in 2023, 16.1 percent of you lived below the national poverty line. The World Bank is financing a $608 million programme to scale up electricity access, the development of Greater Kampala, climate-smart agriculture, integrated water management, women’s enterprises and irrigation. The instruments are aimed at the right guarantees.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. Only two in every hundred of you cook with clean fuel. Only eighteen in every hundred of you drink safely managed water at home. At the last count, in 2014, eighty-two in every hundred of your children reached the end of primary school unable to read a simple text. Clean energy sets your Coverage today, at 2 out of 100, with water and reading close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

The challenge now is the last connection: the meter in the home, the pump in the field, the light in the clinic. A grid this clean is an asset that few nations own, and every household connected to it is a household connected to clean power.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Uganda: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no Ugandan falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“The Nile already lights your grid. Let it light every home and clinic along its banks.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect Uganda Design Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect Uganda will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.