Eronda
JF-Expert Member
- Dec 16, 2025
- 405
- 285
In 2019, Uganda’s NGO Bureau, the regulator for non-profits, conducted a census of how many of the country’s registered non-governmental organisations actually existed.
The register said 14,207. The real number was closer to 2,800. More than 11,000 organisations that had been registered, certified, and entrusted with public and donor resources had slowly disappeared without telling anyone.
There was neither a formal closure nor an exit notice to government. They simply stopped. Most, according to Stephen Okello, who runs the NGO Bureau, informed exactly one person they were leaving. “They only told the landlord.”
That gap between 14,207 and 2,800 is a window into a deeper problem, one that has less to do with government regulation and more with how Uganda’s NGOs are built, governed, and run in the first place.
What is an NGO actually supposed to be?
A non-governmental organisation is, at its core, a private institution built to serve a public purpose.
It has a governing board. It has members. It has rules, written down in a founding document called a constitution, about how decisions get made, how money is spent, and who is accountable to whom. That is the theory.
In practice, Okello has spent years chairing the NGO Bureau’s Complaint and Dispute Resolution Committee, sitting across the table from organisations in various stages of trouble.
Before he even opens the NGO Act, which is the national law governing NGOs, he reaches for their own constitution and starts asking questions.
What he finds, almost every time, is that “95 percent of organisations have never read their own constitution. Management, board members, same thing. They relate to it as if for the first time.”
How does this happen? When people set up an NGO in Uganda, many hire a lawyer to draft the constitution, sign where they are told, and move on.
Others copy a constitution from another organisation, sometimes with that other organisation’s details still inside.
The paperwork gets filed. The organisation starts operating, but the constitution goes into a drawer. And the moment nobody is reading the rulebook is the moment the rules stop mattering.
The “My NGO” problem
When there are no rules that anyone follows, something fills the vacuum. Usually, it’s one person.
Okello calls it the “my NGO” problem. Someone founds an organisation, registers it, and then treats it as a personal project.
They decide who sits on the board, they control who gets hired, and they are the final word on every financial decision.
The board, which is supposed to provide independent oversight, ends up populated with people who owe their positions to the very person they are meant to hold accountable.
“The very person on the board should be demanding reports from management. But because the founder pays their retainer, they end up with more bargaining power than even the board. You end up with rubber-stamping boards,” Okello notes.
The same problem repeats at the Annual General Meeting, which is the highest decision-making body in a membership organisation.
In theory, members elect the board and hold leadership accountable. In practice, the “members” are often friends and relatives of the founder, recruited because they will not ask uncomfortable questions.
“If you see an AGM being held by three people: a husband, a wife, a daughter, a son,” that is immediately a red flag,” Okello cautions. Ernest Kalibala, a lawyer who advises NGOs on compliance, explains how this dysfunction becomes invisible over time.
“You get accustomed to doing things in the way you have been doing them, and they start to look normal. Breaking a rule often enough makes the rule feel like the exception,” he says.
Thus, he adds, by the time an “external investigator arrives, the organisation has been operating outside its own governance framework for so long that proper governance feels foreign”.
Why people start NGOs
So many people, including Okello, believe many NGOs in Uganda were never built to do what they claim to do.
Some founders register because they believe donor money flows freely to anyone with a certificate and a mission statement. Others are solving a personal unemployment problem wrapped in charitable language.
When reality arrives, for instance, when proposals get rejected, when the donor moves on, when money does not materialise, the organisation has nothing to fall back on.
So, it closes, slowly, without notice, and joins the 11,000 ghosts on the register.
“An organisation that exists to serve its founder’s interests will not invest in proper board structures or financial systems, because those structures would constrain the founder. And an organisation without those structures cannot survive the inevitable shocks; a donor departing, a programme ending, a key staff member leaving,” Okello notes.
“The constitution in the drawer is a symptom. The motive for building the organisation in the first place is often the disease,” he adds.
All of this internal fragility is now colliding with an external crisis that no Ugandan NGO caused, and none can fully control.
The money is drying up, and fast. In 2025, the United States shut down USAID, removing an estimated $30b annually from global development financing.
In Uganda alone, 15,000 jobs were lost, a Shs600b gap in HIV/AIDS services, and food rations for 1.6 million refugees cut by more than half, official government records show.
Germany then suspended GIZ-supported programmes in October 2025, cutting another Shs22b. Globally, the OECD reported official development assistance fell 6 percent in 2024, with the UK, France, and Canada all cutting aid budgets.
This illustrates that the era of reliable, renewable donor funding, around which Uganda’s NGO sector was built, is ending. None of this should have been a surprise. In 2016, Uganda’s NGO law was amended to let organisations generate income through their own business activities, reducing dependence on grants.
After nearly 10 years, fewer than 2 percent have used that provision, according to Okello, who notes that: “The sector has been in a comfort zone, writing proposals, receiving funding, and yet what they are seeing before them is something real.”
Now the comfort zone is gone. And organisations that never built financial resilience are discovering, very suddenly, that they have none.
The danger of desperation
There is a risk here that goes beyond individual organisations' closure.
When a sector becomes financially desperate, it starts making different decisions about money. Organisations that can no longer pay their staff or fund their programmes will eventually stop asking hard questions about where the next grant is coming from.
“You are going to end up with a sector that becomes supply-driven. Whoever has the money, regardless of what the intention is, bring it,” notes Okello, who is also a member of Uganda’s national anti-money laundering task force.
Over 98 percent of Uganda’s NGOs rely entirely on foreign donations, official documentation from the NGO Bureau shows.
Combined with a collapsing donor landscape, this creates a sector vulnerable to capture by interests that do not share its stated values.
This means a sector built to amplify the voices of the vulnerable can, under enough financial pressure, end up serving whoever signs the cheque.
The regulator is also under pressure
The NGO Bureau has changed significantly. In July 2024, the NGO Amendment Act dissolved the Bureau as an independent body and absorbed it into the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a ministry currently led by military officials.
Staff was cut from 98 to 32. Civil society groups have raised concerns that oversight could shift from development impact to political risk monitoring, concerns made more pointed by the Attorney General’s 2022 declaration that NGOs are “enemies of Uganda” and a wave of pre-election suspensions in 2025-2026.
But Okello pushes back, saying, “If you feel compliance is being used as an excuse against you, you are safer remaining in compliance.”
Kalibala agrees from an advisory point of view. Saying: “The Bureau is very responsive if you take the initiative. It is quite different if they find you during a monitoring visit.”
One concrete piece of good news is that funding has been secured to move registration, permits, and renewals fully online, ending the burden of travelling to Kampala for routine services. That arrives in the next financial year.
What does survival actually look like?
Uganda’s NGO compliance level has risen from 26.8 percent in 2016 to 62.4 percent today, real, hard-won progress, official documentation from the NGO Bureau shows.
But it still means more than one in three operating NGOs are not meeting their basic legal obligations.
“The law is not going anywhere. If anything, all indications are that it is going to be strengthened,” Kalibala notes.
A sustainable NGO is one where people have actually read the constitution, like board members and senior staff, not just the executive director.
It is also one where the board asks questions and makes decisions independently, where a finance manual governs how money moves, and where someone tracks permits, returns, and regulatory changes before they become emergencies.
And most critically, where there has been an honest conversation about where the money will come from in five years, with an answer that does not depend entirely on one donor, one programme, or one foreign government’s shifting priorities.
Source: Daily Monitor
The register said 14,207. The real number was closer to 2,800. More than 11,000 organisations that had been registered, certified, and entrusted with public and donor resources had slowly disappeared without telling anyone.
There was neither a formal closure nor an exit notice to government. They simply stopped. Most, according to Stephen Okello, who runs the NGO Bureau, informed exactly one person they were leaving. “They only told the landlord.”
That gap between 14,207 and 2,800 is a window into a deeper problem, one that has less to do with government regulation and more with how Uganda’s NGOs are built, governed, and run in the first place.
What is an NGO actually supposed to be?
A non-governmental organisation is, at its core, a private institution built to serve a public purpose.
It has a governing board. It has members. It has rules, written down in a founding document called a constitution, about how decisions get made, how money is spent, and who is accountable to whom. That is the theory.
In practice, Okello has spent years chairing the NGO Bureau’s Complaint and Dispute Resolution Committee, sitting across the table from organisations in various stages of trouble.
Before he even opens the NGO Act, which is the national law governing NGOs, he reaches for their own constitution and starts asking questions.
What he finds, almost every time, is that “95 percent of organisations have never read their own constitution. Management, board members, same thing. They relate to it as if for the first time.”
How does this happen? When people set up an NGO in Uganda, many hire a lawyer to draft the constitution, sign where they are told, and move on.
Others copy a constitution from another organisation, sometimes with that other organisation’s details still inside.
The paperwork gets filed. The organisation starts operating, but the constitution goes into a drawer. And the moment nobody is reading the rulebook is the moment the rules stop mattering.
The “My NGO” problem
When there are no rules that anyone follows, something fills the vacuum. Usually, it’s one person.
Okello calls it the “my NGO” problem. Someone founds an organisation, registers it, and then treats it as a personal project.
They decide who sits on the board, they control who gets hired, and they are the final word on every financial decision.
The board, which is supposed to provide independent oversight, ends up populated with people who owe their positions to the very person they are meant to hold accountable.
“The very person on the board should be demanding reports from management. But because the founder pays their retainer, they end up with more bargaining power than even the board. You end up with rubber-stamping boards,” Okello notes.
The same problem repeats at the Annual General Meeting, which is the highest decision-making body in a membership organisation.
In theory, members elect the board and hold leadership accountable. In practice, the “members” are often friends and relatives of the founder, recruited because they will not ask uncomfortable questions.
“If you see an AGM being held by three people: a husband, a wife, a daughter, a son,” that is immediately a red flag,” Okello cautions. Ernest Kalibala, a lawyer who advises NGOs on compliance, explains how this dysfunction becomes invisible over time.
“You get accustomed to doing things in the way you have been doing them, and they start to look normal. Breaking a rule often enough makes the rule feel like the exception,” he says.
Thus, he adds, by the time an “external investigator arrives, the organisation has been operating outside its own governance framework for so long that proper governance feels foreign”.
Why people start NGOs
So many people, including Okello, believe many NGOs in Uganda were never built to do what they claim to do.
Some founders register because they believe donor money flows freely to anyone with a certificate and a mission statement. Others are solving a personal unemployment problem wrapped in charitable language.
When reality arrives, for instance, when proposals get rejected, when the donor moves on, when money does not materialise, the organisation has nothing to fall back on.
So, it closes, slowly, without notice, and joins the 11,000 ghosts on the register.
“An organisation that exists to serve its founder’s interests will not invest in proper board structures or financial systems, because those structures would constrain the founder. And an organisation without those structures cannot survive the inevitable shocks; a donor departing, a programme ending, a key staff member leaving,” Okello notes.
“The constitution in the drawer is a symptom. The motive for building the organisation in the first place is often the disease,” he adds.
All of this internal fragility is now colliding with an external crisis that no Ugandan NGO caused, and none can fully control.
The money is drying up, and fast. In 2025, the United States shut down USAID, removing an estimated $30b annually from global development financing.
In Uganda alone, 15,000 jobs were lost, a Shs600b gap in HIV/AIDS services, and food rations for 1.6 million refugees cut by more than half, official government records show.
Germany then suspended GIZ-supported programmes in October 2025, cutting another Shs22b. Globally, the OECD reported official development assistance fell 6 percent in 2024, with the UK, France, and Canada all cutting aid budgets.
This illustrates that the era of reliable, renewable donor funding, around which Uganda’s NGO sector was built, is ending. None of this should have been a surprise. In 2016, Uganda’s NGO law was amended to let organisations generate income through their own business activities, reducing dependence on grants.
After nearly 10 years, fewer than 2 percent have used that provision, according to Okello, who notes that: “The sector has been in a comfort zone, writing proposals, receiving funding, and yet what they are seeing before them is something real.”
Now the comfort zone is gone. And organisations that never built financial resilience are discovering, very suddenly, that they have none.
The danger of desperation
There is a risk here that goes beyond individual organisations' closure.
When a sector becomes financially desperate, it starts making different decisions about money. Organisations that can no longer pay their staff or fund their programmes will eventually stop asking hard questions about where the next grant is coming from.
“You are going to end up with a sector that becomes supply-driven. Whoever has the money, regardless of what the intention is, bring it,” notes Okello, who is also a member of Uganda’s national anti-money laundering task force.
Over 98 percent of Uganda’s NGOs rely entirely on foreign donations, official documentation from the NGO Bureau shows.
Combined with a collapsing donor landscape, this creates a sector vulnerable to capture by interests that do not share its stated values.
This means a sector built to amplify the voices of the vulnerable can, under enough financial pressure, end up serving whoever signs the cheque.
The regulator is also under pressure
The NGO Bureau has changed significantly. In July 2024, the NGO Amendment Act dissolved the Bureau as an independent body and absorbed it into the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a ministry currently led by military officials.
Staff was cut from 98 to 32. Civil society groups have raised concerns that oversight could shift from development impact to political risk monitoring, concerns made more pointed by the Attorney General’s 2022 declaration that NGOs are “enemies of Uganda” and a wave of pre-election suspensions in 2025-2026.
But Okello pushes back, saying, “If you feel compliance is being used as an excuse against you, you are safer remaining in compliance.”
Kalibala agrees from an advisory point of view. Saying: “The Bureau is very responsive if you take the initiative. It is quite different if they find you during a monitoring visit.”
One concrete piece of good news is that funding has been secured to move registration, permits, and renewals fully online, ending the burden of travelling to Kampala for routine services. That arrives in the next financial year.
What does survival actually look like?
Uganda’s NGO compliance level has risen from 26.8 percent in 2016 to 62.4 percent today, real, hard-won progress, official documentation from the NGO Bureau shows.
But it still means more than one in three operating NGOs are not meeting their basic legal obligations.
“The law is not going anywhere. If anything, all indications are that it is going to be strengthened,” Kalibala notes.
A sustainable NGO is one where people have actually read the constitution, like board members and senior staff, not just the executive director.
It is also one where the board asks questions and makes decisions independently, where a finance manual governs how money moves, and where someone tracks permits, returns, and regulatory changes before they become emergencies.
And most critically, where there has been an honest conversation about where the money will come from in five years, with an answer that does not depend entirely on one donor, one programme, or one foreign government’s shifting priorities.
Source: Daily Monitor
