Lower tariffs can open markets. Meeting quality and safety standards determines whether Ugandan businesses can enter them, and stay there.
Until 2019, a food processor in Gulu or Mbarara who needed a product tested had to send samples hundreds of kilometres to the Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) laboratories near Kampala. The journey added time and cost, and samples sometimes arrived damaged and unusable. For a small firm, proving that its product met the standard could take longer than making it.
That has changed. UNBS now tests samples in Gulu, Mbale and Mbarara, and the bureau reports that average turnaround for analysis has fallen from 25 days to about 10. Nearly 2,000 businesses have been trained in standards compliance. The laboratories and training were financed by TradeMark Africa with Danish funding, alongside support from the European Union and the Netherlands.
It is a modest-sounding reform with a large point behind it. As tariffs fall under the African Continental Free Trade Area, the question that increasingly decides whether a product sells is not what duty it pays, but whether a buyer, and the buyer’s regulator, can trust it.
There are two layers to that trust. One is regulatory: does a product meet the safety, health and technical rules of the market it is entering? The other is commercial: will a buyer stake their own reputation on a supplier’s consistency? The first is a condition of entry. The second decides who keeps the business.
Both carry real costs when they fail. Kenya’s cut-flower earnings slipped from about $567 million in 2023 to $556 million in 2024, a fall the country’s 2025 Economic Survey partly attributed to interceptions linked to a single pest, the false codling moth. Rules on plant health exist for good reason; the lesson is that exporters who cannot show they meet them lose ground quickly.
Uganda’s laboratories are part of a wider regional effort. An independent evaluation of TradeMark Africa’s standards work across Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Burundi and Tanzania found that the average time needed to assess whether a product conforms fell by about 44%, from seven months in 2017 to four in 2023, and that median compliance costs more than halved. More than 80% of firms surveyed said better compliance had helped them sell in existing and new markets.
The human side of that is easy to recognise. Robert Masiko founded his grain business, Numa, after finding that the millet on sale “had a lot of sand”. Speaking when UNBS opened its Mbarara laboratory in May 2023, he said: “I realised the importance of quality, and providing high quality is our goal.” He was equally clear about what small firms still lack: “Entrepreneurs need more advice to standardise their products.”
That gap is now visible in the numbers. By UNBS’s own account, demand for its certification services exceeds its capacity. When testing comes within reach, businesses use it.
East Africa is not starting from scratch. EAC partner states have harmonised a large body of standards, and at the Mbarara launch David Livingstone Ebiru, then Executive Director of UNBS, said: “We have already signed mutual standards with all the standards agencies.”
The harder question is whether those commitments are applied consistently at the border. Organisers of this year’s Africa Trade Development Forum note that a product cleared in one country must often be re-tested and re-certified in another. Closing that gap, so that a test done in Mbarara is accepted in Nairobi or Kigali without repetition, would do more for small exporters than any new agreement.
Digitisation helps. Mozambique’s move to electronic plant-health certificates cut the time to obtain one from about 12 days to two or three, while making forged certificates far harder to pass off.
The prize is large. Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises make up more than 80% of businesses in Africa, yet according to the International Trade Centre fewer than 20% export directly, in part because meeting quality requirements is costly and complicated. Every laboratory moved closer to producers, and every certificate accepted across a border, lowers that barrier.
The test for Addis
These questions will be on the table at the Africa Trade Development Forum in Addis Ababa on 23 and 24 November, which TradeMark Africa is co-hosting with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Trade and Regional Integration and Ministry of Transport and Logistics under the theme Building Africa’s Exports Through Quality.
For Uganda’s exporters, the test of the Addis forum will be practical: faster testing, certificates accepted across borders, and compliance support that small businesses can afford.
Lower tariffs will mean little if exporters cannot prove the quality of what they sell. Uganda has brought testing closer to its producers. The next task is to make that proof affordable, timely and accepted across borders.
Disclosure: The editor provides communications support to TradeMark Africa’s Uganda Country Programme.
