The Missing Thread:

Inside her Kampala workspace, Margaret Nakinobe is surrounded by the things from which fashion is made: fabric, unfinished garments, ideas waiting to take shape and the hands of artisans turning those ideas into clothes.

For Nakinobe, founder and creative director of sustainable fashion brand Latela, a piece of clothing is rarely just something to wear.

“A piece speaks volumes about someone’s personality and the values they represent,” she says.

Her work experiments with what already exists. Garments can be repurposed. Local artisans become part of the production process. Ugandan identity meets contemporary African fashion.

However, somewhere between concepting garments and selling it is the less glamorous side of Uganda’s fashion industry.

There are fabrics to buy, equipment to find, workers to pay and customers to convince that locally produced clothes are worth their money.

That is where Nakinobe says creativity and entrepreneurship meets the realities of doing business in Uganda.

“It feels like walking uphill barefoot,” she says. “You have the vision, but the system doesn’t support you enough to grow,”

It is a striking description of an industry Uganda increasingly wants to recognise as part of its economy.

The country has designers. It grows cotton. And is aspiring to clothe itself.

For decades, young fashion entrepreneurs are building brands. The Government of Uganda does not allocate a standalone budget exclusively to fashion and local garment manufacturers.

Yet in its bid to dress itself, Uganda is pushing to ban and heavily tax second-hand clothing imports to protect its local textile industry and promote domestic manufacturing.

President Yoweri Museveni announced a national ban on imported used clothing, famously criticizing the trade and urging citizens to wear new, locally made garments.

The government tabled the External Trade (Amendment) Bill, 2026, which proposes a 30% environmental levy on imported second-hand clothes while offering tax relief on essential medical and agricultural goods.

The only available funding opportunity for the fashion industry in Uganda is embedded within larger allocations for the cultural and creative industries, as well as the textile and manufacturing sectors.

Fashion entrepreneurs can borrow between UGX 500,000 and UGX 50 million at a fixed, low-interest rate of 5% per annum, utilizing intellectual property and registered designs as collateral and government is putting public money into the creative economy.

Uganda’s fashion story stretches far beyond Kampala’s modern studios and fashion shows.

Abbas Kaijuka has watched that system for more than a decade.

The founder and creative director of Kai’s Divo Collection established his fashion house in 2014 and has since built a recognised luxury fashion brand, dressing celebrities and public figures and representing Uganda on regional and international fashion platforms.

His experience has convinced him that Uganda does not suffer from a shortage of fashion talent.

“The challenge is not talent,” Kaijuka says. “It is perception.”

He believes fashion has not received the same recognition afforded to some other parts of Uganda’s creative economy.

A customer may want to buy Ugandan, but if locally produced clothes cost significantly more than imported alternatives, the choice becomes an economic one.

Yet the country produces cotton, yet designers like Nakinobe still operate in a market heavily dependent on imported fabrics and finished clothing.

Much of Uganda’s cotton leaves the country before completing the journey from fibre to finished garment. That means some designers must buy imported materials whose prices reflect transport, taxes and other costs before a single stitch is made.

Then they must sell the finished garment in a market filled with comparatively cheap imported clothing and second-hand clothes, commonly known as Mivumba.

For Nakinobe, that makes the price of production a question of survival.

She believes reducing taxes on fabrics, production inputs and industrial machinery could give local designers more room to compete.

But the government says it is already trying to address one of the industry’s biggest problems: money.

Government enters the fitting room

In the 2025/26 financial year, the Government of Uganda allocated Shs66 billion to the creative economy.

Among the interventions is the Creative Uganda Revolving Fund, through which government says creatives, including people working in fashion, textiles and crafts, can access affordable financing.

Under the arrangement, creatives are expected to organise themselves into registered Savings and Credit Cooperative Organisations, or SACCOs, through which loans can be accessed at an interest rate of five percent.

But an allocation is not the same thing as impact.

For designers struggling to buy fabric and equipment, the more important questions are how much of this money has actually reached creatives, how much has reached fashion businesses specifically, who qualifies, how beneficiaries are selected and what government expects the investment to achieve.

But money alone will not fix the system around them.

“We need to be thoughtful in building a fashion industry that works end to end, from the fabric sourcing to equipment, among other things. Because our challenge is not talent,” she says.

A missing link

Creative industries advocate Charles Batambuze sees the contradiction from another end of the production chain.

Uganda grows cotton. But between the cotton field and Nakinobe’s workshop should exist an industrial chain capable of spinning fibre, weaving and dyeing textiles, manufacturing fabric and supplying garment producers.

Batambuze argues that Uganda failed to fully develop that chain.

“Instead of transforming more of its cotton into higher-value finished products at home, we have continued exporting raw materials while importing fabrics and finished clothing,” he says.

For Batambuze, therefore, asking whether Uganda can dress itself is not merely a fashion question.

It is an industrialisation question.

A country can produce cotton, but if it lacks sufficient capacity to turn that cotton into competitively priced textiles and garments, designers at the end of the chain remain dependent on somebody else’s factories.

And public investment in individual creative businesses, he argues, cannot by itself repair that missing industrial infrastructure.

Beyond handing out money

Ronnie Nsubuga the founder of Crystal Models Africa and president of the Pearl of Africa Fashion Alliance says he sees an industry with plenty of creativity but fragmented.

“The industry has the creativity,” he says. “What we need is structure, education and leadership … access to a government loan will mean little if the entrepreneur receiving it does not understand business regulations, intellectual property, production systems or the market in which they are trying to compete”.

He argues for a strong national structure capable of representing the industry, setting professional standards and engaging government with a collective voice.

He also wants greater investment in fashion education, technical skills, modern machinery, intellectual-property awareness and textile value addition.

That raises an uncomfortable policy question.

For Nakinobe, the debate eventually returns to something tangible.

A garment must still be made.

Fabric must be found. Someone must cut it. Someone must stitch it. Someone must market it. And eventually, somebody must decide that a Ugandan-made piece is worth buying.

Her experience suggests that Uganda’s fashion problem is not a shortage of ideas.