In 2026, Uganda crossed a concrete milestone in African public governance by simultaneously launching a national monitoring and evaluation dashboard, a performance report on local authorities, and a roadmap for the Sustainable Development Goals for 2025-2030. These three tools form a coherent system that makes visible, for the first time at this scale, what the country’s 135 districts and municipalities actually do. The question this system raises goes beyond Uganda: whether transparency of results strengthens local democracy, or consolidates central power at the expense of the periphery.
The Essentials
- In 2026, Uganda launched an integrated national monitoring and evaluation system covering local authorities, accompanied by an SDG roadmap for 2025-2030, according to the United Nations in Uganda.
- The system makes the performance of 135 districts comparable across health, education, and infrastructure indicators, creating unprecedented accountability pressure.
- The Ministry of Finance and the National Planning Bureau lead the system, with technical support from the United Nations Development Programme.
- The structural risk is documented: without adequate fiscal transfers and solid local counter-powers, transparency of results can serve to stigmatize poor districts rather than help them.
- The 2030 horizon tests whether a lower-middle-income country can align administrative decentralization and digital accountability without sacrificing one for the other.
Measuring Performance When the State is Young
Uganda administers a territory of 241,000 km² from Kampala, but public services—water, schools, roads, clinics—are delivered by local authorities whose capacity varies considerably. For a long time, the central state had no reliable overall picture of what these structures actually produced. Reports existed, but they moved up through administrative channels, filtered at each level, and often arrived in the capital too late to be useful.
The turning point dates back a decade. From around 2015 onwards, the Ugandan government began building standardized data collection tools at the district level. The 2026 launch marks a consolidation of these efforts: the three instruments published simultaneously transform a series of experiments into a coherent architecture. The national dashboard aggregates sectoral indicators. The local authorities’ performance report ranks and compares them.
The SDG roadmap anchors everything in an internationally measurable framework by 2030.
Measuring, therefore, is already a political act. Knowing which district properly vaccinates its children, which other spends below its health budget, which other accumulates unexecuted public contracts—this introduces a results-based logic where procedures once reigned. For local officials, this changes the nature of responsibility.
A Technical Apparatus Supported by Identifiable Actors
The system did not build itself. The Ministry of Finance, Economic Planning and Development, supported by Uganda’s National Planning Bureau, designed the collection architecture. The UNDP provided technical and methodological support. The United Nations in Uganda published the analysis of the 2026 national performance review, which constitutes the public assessment of this first year of full operation.
This multiple institutional leadership confers on the system a legitimacy that transcends any single ministry, making it difficult to bury if a minister changes. The plurality of overseeing bodies does, however, create its own governance questions: who updates the indicators, who arbitrates when sectoral data contradicts local data, who decides to publish or withhold a report unfavorable to a politically sensitive district.
On the technical side, the system relies on standardized forms transmitted digitally from districts to a central platform. This assumes minimal connectivity and trained local staff—two conditions not uniformly met across the territory. In rural districts of the north and east of the country, network coverage remains partial, and local administrative capacities are weaker than in Kampala or Entebbe. The known risk is this: the best-connected and best-staffed districts feed the system more regularly, which can produce a biased picture where the poorest performers appear less capable simply because they report less.
Accountability Without Resources, a Flawed Apparatus
This asymmetry between results obligations and action capacity produces an additional perverse effect: the most disadvantaged districts, precisely those the system is meant to help, accumulate poor rankings without having the margins of maneuver to respond. Accountability pressure then turns against them, reinforcing their stigmatization among donors and sectoral ministries, rather than directing compensatory resources toward them. Without an explicit corrective redistribution mechanism, transparency amplifies existing territorial inequalities rather than reducing them.
Transparency of results makes sense only if the measured actors have the means to correct their trajectories. The Ugandan system encounters a serious structural limit here.
Ugandan local authorities remain massively dependent on transfers from the central government to finance their expenditures. According to OECD data, local governments in sub-Saharan Africa generate on average between 10 and 20 percent of their revenue themselves, the rest coming from national allocations or external financing. Uganda exemplifies this dependence particularly starkly: central government transfers represent more than 95 percent of local authorities’ financing. Consequently, a district ranking at the bottom of the dashboard does not necessarily have the budgetary capacity to hire the nurses it lacks or pave the roads the system identifies as degraded. Measurement reveals the gap but does not provide the means to close it.
This point intersects a broader debate on African decentralization. Infrastructure First, Algorithms Second: the order of priorities matters. A digital dashboard superimposed on insufficient physical and financial infrastructure risks producing frustration rather than progress. The SDG roadmap for 2025-2030 announced by Kampala is useful only if it is accompanied by a revision of fiscal transfer mechanisms to local levels, which the 2026 UN brief does not yet indicate explicitly.
The question of judicial independence is equally structural. Ugandan local authorities have limited capacity to lodge appeals when promised allocations do not arrive or when an indicator penalizes them on a contestable basis. Without functional administrative and judicial counter-powers, accountability remains one-way: districts report to the center, but the center does not report to the districts.
Other African Countries Facing Comparable Tools
Uganda is not inventing this apparatus in a vacuum. Several African experiences allow assessment of what works.
Rwanda has developed since 2006 a system for evaluating district performance, the District Performance Contracts, or Imihigo, whose first contracts were signed on April 4, 2006 between mayors and the president of the republic. Results in health and education have been documented positively by the World Bank. But the Rwandan model operates within a highly centralized state where administrative discipline is strong and political pluralism weak. It would be imprudent to transfer its lessons directly to Uganda, whose political structure is different, more fragmented, with more visible opposition even if constrained.
Kenya attempted a different approach with its system of conditional transfers to counties, created by the 2010 Constitution. Decentralization is stronger there, counties have their own fiscal base, and monitoring systems have been integrated into an architecture of direct political accountability, with governors elected by universal suffrage. Results are mixed—some counties have substantially improved their services, others have multiplied corruption scandals—but the upward accountability logic is more robust.
South Africa offers an instructive counter-example, and perhaps the most relevant for Kampala. The country ranks at the very top of the UN’s e-government development index and in the top third globally for digital participation. Yet the auditor general’s report continues to note the rarity of clean audits and the persistence of substantial irregularities at the municipal level. The average South African cannot be described as “digitally enabled”: despite various digital tools, leaders and residents have only limited visibility into municipal operations beyond the metrics required for regulatory reporting. More telling still: these reforms have resulted in greater transparency of certain indicators, but this transparency is dictated by reporting needs, not by residents’ needs; visibility does not necessarily translate into improved results.
South Africa thus shows that a state can be digitally advanced and locally failing simultaneously. This paradox—governing well on screen, poorly on the ground—is one of the major risks Uganda must avoid.
Research conducted in rural and smaller municipalities has documented persistent implementation failures and minimal supervision gains despite comparable technological investments, due to infrastructure constraints, skills shortages, and fragile administrative systems. The warning applies directly to Uganda’s landlocked districts.
Uganda sits between these three models. Less authoritarian than Rwanda, less decentralized than Kenya, less digitally equipped than South Africa. The system launched in 2026 could evolve in one direction or another depending on policy choices in coming years, and the SDG roadmap constitutes, in this framework, a measurable public commitment that makes retreat more costly.
Mutual Lessons with the Rest of the World
International experience on data-driven governance is rich enough to inform Ugandan thinking, provided lessons are extracted without mechanically transposing models.
India offers the most illuminating parallel, both as a source of inspiration and as a cautionary tale. India’s NITI Aayog has developed a Data Governance and Quality Index (DGQI), used by ministries to evaluate program digitalization and monitor policies. According to a report published in 2023, this tool has helped many government departments progress significantly in digital transformation to improve monitoring and development outcomes, and state governments and local authorities are explicitly invited to replicate this approach. More concretely, the DISHA dashboard allows parliamentarians, local elected officials, and district administrators to monitor the performance of all major national programs at the finest scale. In 2019, Gujarat’s high scores on groundwater recharge prompted Rajasthan to adopt similar practices; dashboards thus fostered “competitive and cooperative federalism” in action, states borrowing best practices from one another, not through constraint, but through emulation.
But India also illustrates the structural limits that Uganda knows well. Digital India program initiatives have struggled to reach the district level, often due to infrastructure constraints, integration problems, and technical complexity; in many cases, administrators continue using spreadsheets and emails, causing delays in monitoring. The power of a national dashboard does not guarantee its landing in the last administrative kilometer.
Ethiopia brings a complementary methodological lesson. In community health, the country developed an integrated digital system for performance monitoring, eCHIS, with real-time dashboards and automated supervision tools. Stakeholders proposed incentivizing health agents and supervisors displaying high performance through non-financial or mixed rewards, a participatory process that resulted in robust, context-adapted interventions. The lesson is simple: participation by field actors in system design, not just in its operation, largely determines its appropriation.
Outside Africa, Brazil has built over the years one of the most advanced systems of local transparency, with its federal transparency portal and municipal ranking system, the Escala Brasil Transparente. The initiative aims to deepen monitoring of public transparency at the state and municipal levels concerning the right to information access. Empirical analyses have shown that public transparency mechanisms are negatively associated with irregularities in Brazilian municipalities—in other words, publishing data effectively reduces local corruption when civil society can seize upon it. But the availability of technology itself is not enough to improve democracy. Brazil took two decades to build a civic ecosystem capable of using this data.
Uganda does not have this timeframe.
This panorama sketches in outline four conditions without which a monitoring and evaluation system remains an internal management tool rather than a democratic lever. First, authentic decentralization anchored in solid legal frameworks, adequate fiscal resources, and empowered citizenship. Second, an organized civil society capable of seizing published data, because transparency does not automatically translate into responsiveness. Third, digital infrastructure that extends to the last kilometer, for without it, existing administrative capacity, fiscal resources, and political will determine governance outcomes far more than digital tools themselves. Fourth, incentive mechanisms that reward performance rather than punish failure, because stigmatization without resources produces paralysis, not improvement.
The experience of these countries is instructive for Africa and beyond: successful decentralization is as much a matter of permanent adaptation and supervision as of initial legal reforms. Uganda in 2026 is not starting from zero, and the cross-cutting perspective of India, Brazil, South Africa, and Ethiopia offers it a map of errors to avoid as much as paths to follow.
The System’s Effects on Ordinary Citizens
Beyond administrations, the true test of a monitoring and evaluation system is its accessibility to citizens. A national dashboard readable by journalists, civil society organizations, and local user councils transforms information into political leverage. A dashboard accessible only to technocrats and donors remains an internal management tool, useful but without direct democratic effect.
The publication of the 2026 performance report by the United Nations in Uganda signals a will toward external visibility. What remains to be seen is whether granular data by district is accessible in an open format, whether it is translated into local languages, and whether organizations like ACODE (Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment) or the Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group, two active Ugandan actors on fiscal transparency, can use it to fuel public debate.
International experience on this point is instructive. Transparency systems that have had the most impact on local service quality are those where non-governmental actors have been able to seize them. With agricultural automation, fields prosper, villages die out: the risk that digital tools benefit better-resourced areas more than fragile ones is documented well beyond agriculture. A government dashboard follows the same logic if actual access remains unequal. Reliance on digital tools risks excluding those without access to technology or the skills to use it; and many citizen monitoring initiatives depend on projects temporarily funded by donors, which collapse once funding ends.
These two weaknesses lurk for Uganda as well.
The Institutional Trajectory, an Open Question for 2030
The 2030 horizon Uganda has set for itself with its SDG roadmap is close enough to be a credible test, distant enough to let the system build strength. Until then, three variables will determine whether the system produces real accountability or disguised centralization.
The first question is financial: will transfers to local authorities increase in proportion to the results requirements imposed on them, or remain disconnected from those requirements. The second is political: will Ugandan local elections progressively integrate dashboard indicators into electoral debate, or remain dominated by other mobilization logics. The third is technical: will the system keep its promise of equitable treatment between well-connected and landlocked districts, or reproduce the inequalities it claims to measure.
These questions are not unique to Uganda. They face any emerging democracy choosing the path of digital accountability to modernize its public administration. What Kampala is building deserves to be followed, not as an accomplished model, but as an open experiment whose results, good or bad, will feed collective thinking about what governing locally means when decisions rest on data.
Sources
- United Nations in Uganda, Advancing Uganda’s Transformation Agenda: 2026 National Performance Review
- OECD, data on own-source revenues of local authorities in sub-Saharan Africa (no guaranteed URL)
- World Bank, evaluations of the Imihigo program, Rwanda (no guaranteed URL)
- ACODE (Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment), Kampala, reports on budget transparency in Uganda (no guaranteed URL)
- Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group, Uganda, monitoring of national budget and local transfers (no guaranteed URL)
- OPM Uganda – Documents for the 2026 National Performance Review Conference
- SDG Secretariat OPM – Bulletin October-December 2025
- United Nations in Uganda – Closing Remarks National Performance Review Conference 2026
- UNDP Uganda CPD 2026-2030 – M&E Support
- Wikipedia – Districts of Uganda (135 districts as of July 1, 2020)
- Uganda Electoral Commission – 146 districts
- Tandfonline – Imihigo Rwanda, first signing in 2006
- Global Tax Justice – Uganda Manual, central transfers >95%
- Journal of African Development – Decentralization and Local Governance: Lessons from Kenya and Uganda
- ODI – From compliance to agency: The digital journey of South African municipalities
- Frontiers in Sustainable Cities – Implementation of digital governance to enhance oversight in local municipalities
- Isaac Centre for Public Policy, Ashoka University – A Framework for Digitising Monitoring for Better Development Outcomes
- Policy Mandala – Behind the Dashboard: Unpacking India’s Data-Driven Governance
- NCBI – Digital Tools for Boosting the Impact of Fiscal Decentralization in Africa’s Local Economies
- NCBI – What does it take to design digitally enabled performance management: Lessons from Ethiopia
- OECD OPSI – Brazil Transparency Scale-Up Survey
- ResearchGate – Transparency and accountability in digital public services: Learning from the Brazilian cases