At Kalerwe Market, along Kampala’s northern stretch, Julliet Nakyanzi stands before a pile of dried beans, doing the silent, painful arithmetic that now defines daily life for millions of Ugandan mothers.
A few months ago, a kilogramme of yellow beans cost her Shs 4,000. Today, traders demand Shs 6,000. For a family stretching every shilling to cover rent, utilities, and school fees, that Shs 2,000 difference is not a minor inconvenience; it is a huge crisis.
“The cost of food has become increasingly difficult for families to manage,” Nakyanzi says, adjusting her market bag.
To make ends meet, she no longer buys beans alone. She now buys a smaller handful of beans and bulkens the pot with cabbage, stretching the sauce so her children do not go to sleep hungry.
Nakyanzi’s kitchen workaround reflects a quiet, widespread struggle across urban Uganda. A compounding mix of prolonged dry weather and rising transport costs is driving up the price of staple foods, posho, beans, groundnuts, and cooking oil, forcing households to cut back on what they eat, cut out protein, and downgrade their nutrition.
Behind the stall counter, Julius Sebyayi watches customer after customer walk away with half their usual order. The dry spell that scorched rural farms in recent months cut yields, leaving wholesale supply lines depleted.
“Prolonged sunshine has affected food production, resulting in shortages and higher prices,” Sebyayi explains.
The price of groundnuts has climbed from Shs 6,500 to as high as Shs 8,000 per kilogram. Maize flour, posho, the bedrock of the Ugandan working-class diet, has surged from Shs 2,000 to Shs 3,000 per kilogramme.
Wheat flour now sits at Shs 7,500 a kilogramme, while a box of sachet cooking oil has jumped from Shs 80,000 to Shs 90,000. Climate is only half the equation. The cost of moving food from Uganda’s agricultural breadbaskets to its urban centres has doubled.
Moving a load of produce from Kabale in southwestern Uganda to Kampala used to cost suppliers around Shs 20,000. Today, fuel costs have pushed that freight bill to Shs 40,000. Traders have no cushion left; they pass every single shilling of that transport mark-up directly onto urban shoppers.
“We are caught in the middle,” says Betty Nakirinya, another Kalerwe groundnut vendor. “Customers who used to buy two kilogrammes are now settling for one. Everyone’s purchasing power is eroded.”
This shift from animal and plant proteins to cheaper, bulky vegetables reveals a deeper socioeconomic reality. Ugandans are paying more money for significantly less nutritional value. While stable items like sugar offer slight relief, vegetable crops like eggplants have also withered under the harsh sun, driving up greens that usually serve as cheap safety nets.
What happens next depends largely on the skies and the pumps. Nakirinya holds out hope that prices may ease around November if the rains stabilize and agricultural yields recover. But Sebyayi remains sceptical, warning that without broader economic stabilization, high prices will remain the status quo