British citizens have gotten the green light to travel to all parts of Uganda after the UK government on 17 October 2018, put the advisory to the lowest level.
This clearance is contained in a statement on the UK Government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) website https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/uganda/safety-and-security. The Karamoja region where the world famous Kidepo Valley National Park is one of the areas that is to benefit from the new advisory. Kidepo has been rated by CNN, among other international organizations, as one of the must visit parks for 2017.
FCO “no longer advise against all but essential travel to the Karamoja region of north-eastern Uganda; if you’re travelling in this part of Uganda, you should be aware that inter-communal violence and occasional attacks on security forces do happen; foreigners are not usually the target of violence.”
Tourists are stilled called upon to exercise caution as any traveler should while visiting in any part of the world.
“This is very important development for the tourism industry which has often suffered from unfair advisories,” says Stephen Asiimwe, the CEO of Uganda Tourism Board. “
Early this October, H.E. Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s President, hosted about 100 international financiers and conservationists for the Giants Club Conservation and Tourism Investment Forum at the Lake Victoria Serena Golf Resort & Spa. Among the guests were UK’s former Chancellor of Exchequer (finance minister) Rt. Hon George Osborne, who is also a member of Conservative Party.
The forum was meeting to promote tourism investments in different parts of Uganda including Kidepo Valley National Park. Some participants had an opportunity to travel around country to inspect the probable areas for investment.
While the investors forum may have had no hand in changing the advisory, the change in advisory, the advisory has an impact on investment and tourism arrivals. It also compliments the Uganda Government USD1.5m investment in Public Relations and Marketing firms representing the country in the UK, Germany speaking Europe and North America (USA and Canada).
Over the course of 2015-2016, hundreds of travel stories, interviews, photos and other media was published has been published in western media by both professionals and ordinary travelers to the country. This has positively changed perceptions about the country as western audiences came to know more about present day Uganda. This has led in the number of arrivals growing from 1.3m to over 1.4m travelers and income to the national confers rising by US$100m to the current $1.4billion dollars from the tourism sector (UBOS).