The Mineral Resources Infrastructure Development Project (MRIP), running from 2023 to 2028, is the government's vehicle for translating the country's geological potential into a broad-based jobs story. Officials project more than a million jobs across mining, processing, logistics and downstream industries by 2025.
The scale of the ambition is not, by itself, unreasonable. Uganda's rare earths, gold, cobalt, iron and industrial-mineral pipelines together justify a large workforce. The delivery risk sits in coordination: aligning licensing throughput, skills supply, infrastructure and community obligations across ministries and districts.
UMT will publish its own tracking of MRIP milestones through 2024. Getting even part of the way to a million new mineral-sector jobs would reshape the labour market in a country where roughly three-quarters of a million young Ugandans enter the workforce every year.