Bujagali at Fifteen: The Long Shadow of a Hydropower Resettlement

The Bujagali hydroelectric project, commissioned in 2012 on the Nile just downstream of Jinja, remains one of the most-studied infrastructure builds in East African history. It doubled Uganda's grid capacity when it came online. It also, according to the World Bank Inspection Panel's own 2008 investigation report, involved resettlement and consultation shortcomings serious enough to warrant a formal review.

What the record says

A 2012 analysis in the UBC Law Review used Bujagali as a case study of the World Bank's involuntary resettlement policy, arguing that the project laid bare the gap between the policy on paper and its application on the ground. A 2014 Master's thesis at the University of Gavle, drawing on interviews with affected residents, documented lingering social and environmental effects: lost fishing livelihoods, contested compensation and cultural sites submerged behind the reservoir.

None of this is to say Bujagali should not have been built. Uganda's electrification story in the last decade is inseparable from the megawatts it added to the grid. The point is that the price of those megawatts was paid disproportionately by the households closest to the river, and the accounting has never quite balanced.

Why it matters now

Uganda is planning further large hydropower on the Nile and, alongside oil, pinning much of its industrial ambition on projects of comparable scale. Bujagali is the file every one of those projects should have open on the desk. It is a reminder that megaproject economics do not automatically produce megaproject fairness, and that a community's memory of a resettlement outlasts the ribbon-cutting by decades.