Uganda in the 1980s and 1990s

This chapter explains why a local pharmaceutical sector did not emerge in Uganda in the 1980s, and why it was fragile when it ultimately did emerge in the 1990s. Uganda’s political-economic situation during Idi Amin’s military dictatorship between 1971 and 1979, and until the end of the civil war in 1986, was inhospitable for both state-owned and private pharmaceutical manufacturing. Moreover, when Amin expelled Indians in 1972, Ugandan entrepreneurs’ ties abroad were severed, delaying the emergence of a private pharmaceutical sector in the country. A ration kits program was launched in Uganda only in 1986, and it did not have a local component. A pharmaceutical sector cautiously emerged only in the 1990s. The vacuum created during the Amin regime now enabled broader access to the pharmaceutical field, including indigenous Africans on the one hand and non-Ugandans on the other. However, without ties abroad, in addition to lack of state support or foreign assistance, many pharmaceutical firms that opened at the time were quite fragile.