The headline came out last week: inflation for April 2026 was at 3%. The Bank of Uganda says it’s stable. The Ministry of Finance says the economy is on track.
So why does it feel like your 1.2 million shilling salary is buying less than it did in March?
Because inflation numbers don’t live in your kitchen, your fuel tank, or your child’s school bursar’s office. They live in a weighted basket of goods that looks nothing like the reality for most Ugandans.
The Three Things That Actually Move Your Budget
For 80% of Ugandan households, three costs dominate every month: transport, food, and school-related fees. Everything else gets squeezed around them.
Fuel
Diesel hit 5,500 to 6,000 UGX per litre in Kampala this week. Petrol isn’t far behind. That’s a 7% jump since March. If you run a boda, that’s 2,000 UGX extra per day just to break even. If you drive to work, it’s 40,000 UGX gone from your monthly budget before you even think about food.
Fuel is a multiplier. It raises the cost of transporting tomatoes from Mbale to Nakawa Market. It raises the cost of running a bakery in Jinja. It raises the cost of getting your kid to school. So even if posho prices stayed flat, you’d still feel poorer.
Food
Posho is up 12% in Kampala markets since February. Beans are up 9%. Tomatoes fluctuate, but the trend is up. The reason isn’t mysterious: drier weather in eastern Uganda, higher transport costs, and middlemen padding margins because they know you have no choice.
For a family of five, that’s an extra 60,000 UGX a month just to eat the same way. For someone earning minimum wage, that’s 20% of take-home pay gone.
Fees
May is term two. It’s also when private schools and universities demand balances, registration fees, and “development contributions.” Even public schools have costs now – PTA fees, lunch money, uniform replacements.
This is the expense that breaks budgets. You can skip meat for a week. You can’t skip fees without your kid being sent home. So people borrow, cut back on food, or pull money from small businesses to cover it. The cash flow crunch hits in May and June every year, and it’s worse when fuel and food are already high.
Why the Official Numbers Don’t Match Your Reality
Inflation is measured using a basket of 300+ goods and services. That basket includes rent in upscale apartments, electronics, airfare, and imported whiskey. It also includes things you don’t buy every month, like furniture and medical procedures.
The problem is weighting. In that basket, housing and utilities make up nearly 25%. Transport is about 12%. Food is around 18%. But for a low-income household in Lira or Mbarara, food and transport can be 60% of monthly spend. Housing might be 5% because you own a small plot and built incrementally.
So when electronics get cheaper or rent in Kampala flats stays flat, the overall inflation number looks tame. But your personal inflation rate is driven by the 3 things that never stay flat: fuel, food, and fees.
This is why people don’t trust inflation data. It’s not that the statisticians are wrong. It’s that they’re measuring the average Ugandan, and the average Ugandan doesn’t exist.
The Ordinary Ugandan’s Response
The response is always the same: cut, substitute, borrow, or drop out.
Cut meat. Substitute posho for cassava. Borrow from a SACCO to pay fees. Pull a kid from private school and put them in UPE, even if the quality drops.
None of these are choices. They’re coping mechanisms. And they have long-term costs. Kids miss class. Businesses run out of working capital. Health suffers when nutrition drops.
The worst part is the psychological hit. You work the same hours, you get the same salary, but you feel poorer. That feeling erodes trust in the system faster than any political speech can.
The Elite View: Policy vs. Pain
From the Ministry of Finance and BoU’s side, the story is different. Core inflation is stable. The shilling hasn’t collapsed. Diaspora inflows and coffee exports are keeping forex steady. External debt service is manageable. On paper, Uganda looks better than Kenya and Ghana right now.
The problem is transmission. Macro stability doesn’t automatically become micro relief. If the shilling is stable but global oil prices rise, fuel still gets expensive. If URA needs more revenue, traders feel it in withholding tax and digital tracking. If schools run on user fees, the state can’t control that cost.
Policy makers know this. But their tools are blunt: interest rates, reserve requirements, fiscal policy. Raising rates to fight inflation would hurt credit access for small businesses. Cutting spending would hurt service delivery. So they hold the line and wait for global prices to ease.
That’s rational at the national level. It’s cold comfort at the household level.
What’s Actually Driving Costs Right Now
Three factors are colliding this month:
Global oil prices ticked up after OPEC cuts. Uganda imports all its fuel, so we feel it immediately.
Weather shocks in eastern Uganda reduced maize and bean yields. Less supply, same demand, higher prices.
School calendar effects concentrate fees in May. It’s predictable, but households don’t have predictable income to match it.
None of these are caused by domestic mismanagement alone. But all of them hit domestically, and the state has limited tools to cushion them in the short term.
What Would Make It Feel Different
People don’t expect prices to never rise. They expect wages to keep up, and they expect the state to stop making it worse.
Three things would change the mood:
Targeted fuel relief for public transport. A temporary rebate or reduced excise on diesel for bodas and taxis would lower transport costs across the board. It’s been done before in 2022. It works.
Transparent school fee regulation. Private schools can charge what they want, but parents need a breakdown. When “development fees” appear with no explanation, it feels like extortion. Publish fee structures. Enforce caps on mid-term increases.
Faster VAT refunds for small traders. If you’re paying 18% VAT on stock and waiting 6 months for a refund, your working capital is gone. Speed that up, and traders can hold prices longer.
None of this is free. But the cost of inaction is a population that stops believing growth is for them.
The Bottom Line
Your salary feels smaller this month because it is, in real terms. The inflation basket says 3%. Your basket says 12%.
That gap is where political frustration is born. People can handle hardship if they see it’s temporary and shared. What they can’t handle is feeling like the data says one thing and their life says another.
Uganda’s economy is growing. GDP numbers look fine. But growth that doesn’t show up in transport fares, posho prices, and school fees is growth that people experience as abstraction.
Until that changes, every inflation report will be met with the same reaction: “Maybe for you.”
