Kampala

Kampala's digital layer started with money. In 2014 the city authority replaced manual tax ledgers with eCitie: registration, declaration and payment of property rates and licences online, with mobile-money payment and a live arrears dashboard. Own-source revenue rose from UGX 30.3bn in 2011 to UGX 84.9bn in FY2015/16. Independent researchers credit the wider in-house reform rather than the software, and name the limit technology cannot reach: court action against non-payers is an 'empty threat', and the valuation roll dated from 2006.

The measurement came from a university rather than the city. AirQo, founded at Makerere in 2015, designs and builds its own low-cost monitors and runs roughly a hundred of them across Kampala — one of the densest city networks in Africa, with peer-reviewed readings putting average PM2.5 at 41.1 µg/m³ and exceedances of health guidelines by about four to six times. What no reading does is trigger anything: the policy vehicle is a clean-air plan targeting a 50% cut by 2030, still being finalised.

The traffic centre arrived last and is the clearest test of the pattern. Commissioned on 3 September 2025 with Japanese funding, the control centre at City Hall retimes signals at 30 major intersections, with adaptive control at the 27 junctions signalised under the project. Within months the authority's own reported obstacles were vandalised equipment and a motorcycle fleet that grew from roughly 150,000 in 2010 to about 1.35 million in 2022 — traffic the timing plans were never built around — while the licence-plate cameras meant to support enforcement were still in procurement.