Uganda’s housing boom: the delicate balance between growth and sustainability.
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From city suburbs to remote villages, Uganda is echoing to the sound of new houses being built. The country’s fast-growing population and increasingly affluent professional class need housing — and that means a construction boom.
Builders hoping to meet the growing demand are looking to timber framed homes, and although still niche compare to the more usual brick or concrete, new homes prefabricated off-site from locally-sourced timber are beginning to attract attention.
Africa as a whole faces an acute housing deficit, with up to 300 million homes needed to meet the needs of a population estimated to hit 2.5 billion by 2050. Nowhere is this more apparent than Uganda, one of the world’s fastest growing economies, with experts estimating at least 2.4 million new homes are needed just to meet current demand.
‘Almost every country in Sub-Saharan Africa has a housing deficit, and timber construction is the only alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar,’ says Brian Kulubya, Sales Manager and Forestry Expert at Easy Homes, one of Uganda’s timber construction start-ups. ‘Looking at the potential of sustainable forestry, it is very clear that we can have decent homes that are built faster with the use of regenerative materials.’
Betting on Timber
Sustainability in Uganda’s forest value chains is all the more important as the rest of the world catches on to the potential of timber as a complete construction material. ‘Africa is “betting on timber” as the continent turns to mass timber construction to meet a surge in demand for infrastructure,’ reports online trade publication Wood Central. ‘The push to embrace mass timber is part of a multi-billion-dollar investment into African reforestation – driven by China, Europe, and most recently, the Middle East. It is part of a global push to substitute high-carbon building materials to make the construction industry greener and cleaner, with timber replacing steel and concrete in the future of zero-carbon buildings.’
Uganda may be the new ‘Ground Zero for Mass Timber’, but most of the timber homes built so far are relatively modest, using fast-growing native pine. ‘We only use pine for construction, because there is plenty of it in Uganda and we want to reduce the pressures on existing indigenous forests,’ explains Kulubya. ‘Some hardwoods take hundreds of years to grow, but pine takes only 15 years before we can harvest it. Uganda’s climate is good for growing pine, it grows very fast and we only source from well managed forests. Timber is the only building material which has a negative carbon footprint. It’s also affordable and scalable.’
It’s not just house buyers who benefit: Ugandan landowners have been quick to see the potential for planting quick-growing species such as eucalyptus to supply the construction sector. ‘Many people here are building. All the houses you see around have been built using eucalyptus trees. That means we have a ready market — tree planting is increasingly becoming a lucrative venture for farmers here in Uganda,’ says tree farmer Emmanuel Nuwagaba.
Forests under threat
Inevitably, however, there is a downside: eucalyptus thrives in Uganda, sometimes taking just six years to mature - but according to research by Phillip Karugaba of Ugandan NGO The Environmental Action Network (TEAN), eucalyptus plantations are fast displacing indigenous shea butter trees. Large scale commercial plantations, he says, are ‘spreading in the countryside like wild bush fire’ and, he adds, ‘the eucalyptus tree is thirsty and anti-social. Its fast growth rate places great demand on soil water and nutrients while its shed leaves do not permit growth of any other vegetation around the tree.’ According to the Timber Innovation Centre in Kampala, more than 460,000 ha of pine and eucalyptus have already been planted for commercial harvesting, only 30 percent of which are FSC certified.
Despite the hype, there are many who see timber construction as yet another threat to Uganda’s once-plentiful forests. Decades of rampant and frequently illegal deforestation reduced the country’s tree cover in the last century from more than 50 percent to just over 10 percent. Despite a slight recovery in recent years, illegal logging is still rife - the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that more than 80 percent of all timber traded in Uganda is done so illegally.
Yet any new risks to Uganda’s remaining intact forests posed by the nascent timber construction sector are dwarfed by the much bigger — and older — threats from charcoal production. In a region where more than 40 percent of the population lives in poverty, charcoal was historically the only affordable cooking fuel, mainly produced by local communities for local use.
In recent years, however, charcoal production has changed out of all recognition. Northern Uganda moved from small-scale production for a mainly domestic market to becoming one of Africa’s biggest hubs for commercial charcoal burning and logging, supplying not only neighbouring countries such as Kenya, but shipping charcoal as far afield as the Middle East.
In 2023 Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni took action. Faced with Uganda’s unenviable deforestation record — one of the worst in the world, with tree cover declining from around five million ha in 1900 to less than two million ha in 2015 — he ordered a blanket ban on charcoal production and the export of unprocessed timber products.
According to Tom Okello Obong, a former Executive Director of Uganda’s National Forestry Authority (NFA), President Museveni was moved to act after he saw scientific data and satellite imagery showing massive forest cover losses in areas where Chinese-owned sawmills and plywood factories were operating. ‘This is what prompted the President to ban the export of veneer from Uganda,’ Obong told the Earth Journalism Network in a recent interview. ‘We all agreed that the country had a problem and the ban on veneer exports was done to save the country from further deforestation. Yes, we are missing export revenue — but we should not only think of getting dollars at the expense of the country’s environmental health.’
Despite its good intentions the ban has been criticised by both conservationists and aid agencies for its unintended consequences. The widespread closure of sawmills which processed wood veneer mainly destined for China, combined with rocketing charcoal prices, have hit many already poor rural communities hard. In some villages, the cost of a single bag of charcoal rose from around 20,000 Ugandan shillings (around €5) to 90,000 (€23) in just two years, in a country where more than 40 percent of the population live in poverty.
EU-Uganda Forest Partnership: committing to growth and sustainability
Under the terms of the EU-Uganda Forest Partnership signed at the COP27 climate change summit, Uganda has committed to expanding forest cover to 21 percent by 2030, reducing carbon emissions by 22 percent, increasing the number of forest-related jobs and cracking down on the illegal timber trade.
The partnership was given a significant boost in 2024 when the EU made a further €40 million available in grant financing to the government of Uganda, including €15 million for a Sustainable Wood-Based Value Chains initiative to help the country’s forestry sector contribute more sustainably to the economy and the environment. It also hopes to persuade President Museveni to replace the existing bans on timber exports and charcoal production with more nuanced legislation which targets illegal logging and deforestation whilst allowing for economic growth. That includes a more sustainable approach to forest plantations.
‘Plantations are critical for production and for local value chains. Forest plantations produce more than 80 percent of Uganda’s legal timber but they only amount to around six percent of all forest cover,’ says Jochem Schneemann, a consultant with the EU’s Forests for the Future Facility (F4F). ‘The greater the supply of legal wood from plantations, the less likely it is that timber will be sourced illegally. Commercial tree planting by smallholders and SMEs also helps support rural incomes by offering more sustainable job opportunities.’
However, managing the delicate balance between growth and sustainability will be tricky. The challenge for the Sustainable Wood-Based Value Chains initiative is to achieve economies of scale by bringing together smallholder tree farmers, wood processors and construction companies. The project will also provide financial literacy training and business management support to SMEs and help them get access to credit and other financial services. The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), due to come into force at the end of 2025, also aims to slow deforestation rates in the coffee and cocoa sectors, which together destroy around 2,000 ha of Ugandan forest each year.
High tech timber
High above the Kampala skyline, the Timber Innovation Center (TIC), opened on World Environment Day in 2023, is a showcase for the EU-Uganda collaborative approach. Designed and built by a team from Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Uganda, the TIC was constructed using from sustainable timber sourced from Jinja, near the source of the Nile about 100 km from the capital.
‘This is a mass timber construction, the very first of its kind,’ explains Megan King, CEO of Fairventures Worldwide, the German not-for-profit organisation behind the TIC. ‘We are bringing really interesting technology and timber construction from Europe here to Uganda. We work across the entire timber value chain, and that means that we have a forestry unit that works with small holder farmers and promotes the planting of indigenous trees and restoring degraded land. She adds that the aim is for TIC to act as a catalyst ‘to inspire the timber industry here in Uganda to add more value into the timber that's being produced by our farmers.’
‘Uganda actually has a lot of timber,’ says Denis Kavuma, General Manager of the Uganda Timber Growers Association. ‘We believe that it’s going to create many opportunities for the industry. There will be many jobs created, there will be increased incomes for our farmers and other woodworkers, and there’ll be growth and development in the industry value chain.’
‘The price of development must not be deforestation’
‘Uganda is endowed with unique forests hosting an impressive array of biodiversity, and they are also vital for the country’s socio-economic and human development,’ says Schneemann. ‘But the price of development must not be deforestation. Despite the recent slight increase in forest cover, the over-harvesting of timber for construction and charcoal and fuelwood production, conversion to agriculture and grazing land and urban expansion means Uganda’s forests are still at risk and under high pressure.’
Much of this pressure comes from private land owners - Forest Trends reports that privately owned forest has the highest rates of deforestation. ‘Private landowners have the right to use their forest as they wish, and most have felled their natural forest for cash income and for conversion into agriculture,’ notes the latest briefing on illegal deforestation and agricultural commodities in Uganda. ‘Tree plantations for firewood, charcoal, and construction are major drivers of deforestation in Uganda, linked to over 5,000 ha of deforestation per year.’
All of which adds up to an uncertain future for Uganda’s once abundant forests. ‘Forestry is crucial to the lives of millions of Ugandans, especially the poorest sections of society,’ adds Schneemann. ‘Forests and trees provide food, energy, employment, income, an improved quality of life and increased climate resilience. The EU is determined to support the Government of Uganda as it seeks to halt illegal deforestation and enhance the country’s ability to cope with climate-induced shocks and stresses.’
Photo credits as in image name: Trees cleared for charcoal production Northnern Uganda ©Seth GCreative Commons; Timber innovation center Kampala ©Fairtrade Wolrdwide; Timber innovation center Kampala under construction ©Swiss Humanitarian Aid Unit; Stacks of charcoal awaiting collection, Masindi, Uganda©Timothy Akolamazima Creative Commons
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