Nearly two years after a primary school in Busia District was demolished to make way for gold mining activity, the community has yet to see its promised replacement completed. Pupils continue to learn in makeshift shelters, and district education officials say correspondence with the concession holder and central government has produced more meetings than bricks.
The case has become a reference point for what critics call the sequencing problem in Uganda's mineral licensing regime: land can be cleared and operations can commence before host communities see the schools, health posts and access roads that were pledged as part of the social contract underpinning the concession.
OXFAM and the Uganda Parliamentary Alliance on Food and Nutrition Security have both flagged the Busia displacement pattern, calling for tighter enforcement of the Mining and Minerals Act 2022 and for community development agreements to become a binding, audited prerequisite rather than a courtesy.
Advocates for reform stress that the answer is not to slow down formalisation of Uganda's mineral sector. It is to ensure that formalisation is paired with credible, financed community obligations - and that companies which meet those obligations are visibly rewarded, while those that do not are held to account.