At Statistics House in Kampala, a modest signing ceremony carried implications that stretch far beyond the room it took place in.
The Uganda Bureau of Statistics put pen to paper with two cultural institutions, the Samia Bugwe and Tieng Adhola, agreeing to work together on collecting and using community-level statistics.
On paper, it was an administrative partnership.
In practice, it represented an admission that Uganda’s national statistics system has long been missing information that has existed all along, just outside its reach.
Two Communities, Two Distinct Histories
The two institutions entering this agreement are not interchangeable, and their histories explain why each brings something different to the table.
Samia Bugwe represents the Bagwe people, a Bantu community concentrated in Samia-Bugwe County in Busia District, along Uganda’s border with Kenya.
At the time of Uganda’s 2014 census, just under 100,000 people identified as Bagwe, a community recognised as one of the country’s 56 constitutionally acknowledged tribes.
Tieng Adhola, by contrast, represents the Jopadhola people of Tororo District in eastern Uganda, a Nilotic Luo community that makes up roughly eight percent of the national population according to the 2014 census figures, with close to half a million people identifying with the group.
The Tieng Adhola Cultural Institution itself is a relatively young formal structure, established by Padhola clan leaders in 1999 to unite the community under a single cultural authority known as the Kwar Adhola.
Both institutions, despite their different origins, sit on a similar resource: decades of community-level knowledge that has never been captured in a form the national statistics system could use.
The Data Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
Speaking at the signing ceremony, UBOS Executive Director Dr Chris Mukiza put his finger on the core issue driving the partnership.
He said cultural institutions collect a great deal of information through their everyday activities, but that much of it has never been properly documented or used in planning.
It is not that the data does not exist.
It is that it exists scattered across clan registers, village elders’ memory and local ceremonies, disconnected from the national systems meant to guide policy and budgeting.
Mukiza said UBOS will now help the two institutions improve their internal systems and train staff to collect and manage reliable data.
Why Births and Deaths Matter More Than They Seem
Among all the categories of information at stake, Mukiza singled out one as especially urgent.
He said particular attention will be paid to births and deaths, an area where Uganda still has significant gaps in its records.
That gap is not a minor technicality.
Uganda’s own civil registration authority, NIRA, has estimated that only about one percent of deaths are formally registered each year, while UBOS’s own survey-based estimates place death registration completeness closer to 24 percent over recent years, a wide gap that itself illustrates how patchy the underlying data really is.
Birth registration fares somewhat better, but UNICEF has noted that roughly 1.4 million babies are born in Uganda every year, and that closing registration gaps for children under five would make millions more of them officially visible in the eyes of the law.
Without reliable birth and death records, national planners are left estimating rather than knowing how many people actually live, are born, or die in any given community.
A Census Uganda Would Rather Not Repeat the Hard Way
Mukiza connected this local data problem to a much larger national exercise.
He said better administrative records could contribute to building a stronger population register over time.
He added that such a register could eventually reduce the amount of work and money required to conduct Uganda’s national population censuses.
That is not a small consideration in a country whose most recent National Population and Housing Census, conducted in 2024, counted just under 46 million people at enormous logistical and financial cost.
A stronger, continuously updated administrative data system, fed in part by cultural institutions like Samia Bugwe and Tieng Adhola, could in theory let future censuses lean more on existing records and less on door-to-door enumeration from scratch.
What Each Side Brings to the Table
Under the agreements signed, the division of labour is fairly clear.
UBOS will provide technical support and help both institutions establish and strengthen dedicated statistics units within their structures.
UBOS Head of Outreach and Quality Assurance Lydia Namono explained how the arrangement will function in practice.
She said Samia Bugwe and Tieng Adhola will provide information collected through their own administrative structures and help their communities understand and use statistics.
For its part, she said, UBOS will help organise and validate that information to ensure it meets national and international statistical standards.
It is, in effect, a data supply chain running from village elder to national database, with UBOS acting as the technical validator in between.
Bugwe’s Case: Planning Without Guesswork
For Bugwe Kingdom, the practical value of the partnership was framed in very concrete terms.
Deputy Prime Minister Charles Wabwire Wandenya said the partnership will help the kingdom deal with gaps caused by inadequate and irregular population data.
He said having reliable information on population, health and agriculture will make it easier for the kingdom to identify its needs and plan accordingly.
Wandenya was specific about where this matters most.
He said accurate population figures are particularly important in education and health, because they help determine how many schools, classrooms, teachers and health facilities are needed in different areas.
Without that data, a kingdom is essentially planning services for a population it can only estimate.
Tieng Adhola’s Case: Naming the Communities Left Behind
For Tieng Adhola, the Prime Minister of the institution, Richard Obbo Josel, described a data collection model built on structures that already exist.
He said the institution will use its existing grassroots networks to collect information.
He explained that clan leaders and coordinators at the sub-county, parish and village levels will work alongside officials from both the cultural institution and UBOS.
Obbo was direct about what better statistics could reveal.
He said reliable data will help Tieng Adhola establish which communities are most affected by poverty, violence against women and children, and other social and economic problems.
He added that this information will also give cultural leaders solid evidence to bring to government and development partners when advocating for their communities’ needs.
In a region with a documented history of internal conflict and displacement stretching back generations, having hard numbers rather than anecdotes could reshape how Tieng Adhola engages with the state.
A Partnership With National Ambitions
Taken together, the agreements signed with Samia Bugwe and Tieng Adhola point toward something larger than two isolated MoUs.
If cultural institutions across Uganda’s many kingdoms and chiefdoms were to adopt similar data partnerships, the country’s administrative data backbone could gradually strengthen from the ground up, community by community.
For now, the arrangement remains a pilot of sorts, tested through two communities with very different histories but a shared interest in being properly counted.
Whether it becomes a national model will depend on how well the promised statistics units function once the ink on Friday’s agreements has dried.
