Uganda’s diplomatic missions across the Gulf and Middle East have spent the past week in Istanbul reviewing how effectively they are turning diplomatic relationships into trade, investment and tourism gains, as the country pushes ahead with a target to expand its economy tenfold to $500 billion by 2040.
The retreat, held from 21 to 25 June, was organised jointly by Uganda’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development. It brought together officials from Uganda’s missions in Riyadh, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Ankara under the theme “Unlocking Uganda’s Trade and Investment Potential from the Interventions of Economic and Commercial Diplomacy.”
Missions used the week to assess progress against half-year targets, work through coordination problems, and agree work plans for the 2026/27 financial year.
The gathering is one part of a much larger national project. Uganda wants to grow its economy from roughly $50 billion today to $500 billion by 2040, under what it calls the Tenfold Growth Strategy. The plan rests on four priority sectors — agro-industrialisation, tourism, mineral development, and science and technology — and requires the economy to roughly double in size every five years, a pace that depends heavily on exports, foreign investment and diaspora remittances reaching Uganda from abroad.
To help embassies contribute to that target, the government has rolled out an Economic and Commercial Diplomacy Strategy, which sets out how missions should engage with the global economy: widening market access for Ugandan goods and services, courting investment in priority sectors, and using diplomatic relationships to support the country’s development plans. The Ministry of Finance has told missions to concentrate on three things in particular — attracting investment, growing export markets, and bringing in tourists — and that mandate ran through much of the Istanbul retreat.
Ambassador Henry Mayega, who heads the International Economic Cooperation Department, opened proceedings by noting that missions have received increased funding from the Ministry of Finance over the past two financial years, and should use it to chase realistic, measurable targets rather than spread themselves thin. “Missions have received improved funding and are therefore encouraged to prioritise achievable targets and focus on activities with measurable and tangible outcomes,” he said.
Ambassador Richard Kabonero, who heads the recently created Economic and Commercial Diplomacy Hub, used the retreat to address recurring weaknesses in how missions carry out their economic role, including gaps in coordination with Kampala, limited engagement with stakeholders, and a shortage of reliable trade information reaching investors and exporters. He pressed missions to tighten their reporting and align their work more closely with the Tenfold Growth Strategy, the Fourth National Development Plan and Vision 2040. “We are building the capacity of our diplomats and stakeholders and providing feedback on Half-Term Performance for FY 2025/26 and Work Plans for 2026/27 to the Ministry of Finance,” Kabonero said.
Joseph Enyimu, a commissioner at the Ministry of Finance, gave missions a strategic briefing on the Middle East region intended to sharpen how Gulf-based embassies in particular target their commercial outreach.
Uganda’s ambassador to Türkiye, Nusura Tiperu, who hosted the retreat, said Istanbul’s position as a hub linking Asia, Europe and the Middle East made it a fitting venue from which to review the performance of missions across the wider region. She credited close cooperation between the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Finance for keeping the retreat’s economic targets aligned with diplomatic activity on the ground.
The Istanbul retreat closes a cycle of regional reviews held earlier this year covering Uganda’s missions in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Europe and the Americas, meaning every Ugandan mission with an economic mandate has now had its performance assessed against the same national targets.
The pressure on those missions is rising alongside the scale of Uganda’s ambition. The country’s GDP has grown from about $34.7 billion in the 2019/20 financial year to roughly $61.3 billion in 2024/25, and is projected to reach about $66.1 billion by the end of the current financial year — solid progress, but still far short of the $500 billion goal set for 2040. Trade officials have acknowledged that reaching that figure will take more than policy statements; it will require export growth, competitive industries, and the kind of sustained foreign investment that economic diplomacy is meant to help unlock.
That is the calculation behind retreats like the one in Istanbul: Uganda’s embassies are increasingly being asked to function not just as diplomatic posts, but as outposts for trade and investment, with funding, targets and reporting lines built around that expectation.
