The Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) and the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development have introduced a stricter export audit regime for refined gold, requiring licensed refiners to separately declare domestically mined ore from imported and transit bullion at the point of export. The reform targets one of the longest-standing weaknesses in Uganda's mineral statistics: the conflation of re-exported bullion, much of it sourced from neighbouring states, with true domestic production.
For years, headline gold export figures have made Uganda one of the largest gold exporters in East Africa on paper, without a matching footprint in domestic mining royalties or formalised artisanal output. The new regime, backed by chain-of-custody documentation and refinery-level audits, is intended to restore integrity to the numbers and to reassure international buyers concerned about responsible sourcing.
The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) framework, which Uganda joined in 2020, has been pushing for exactly this kind of granular reporting. Whether the new audit regime holds up in practice will depend on enforcement resources at the URA and on the willingness of refiners to publish disaggregated export data.
UgandaMineralTrust will track the first two full reporting cycles under the new regime and cross-reference the URA figures against cooperative-level production data from the Lake Victoria Gold Belt.