When the Rwenzori foothills gave way in May 2024 and the rivers of Kasese and Bunyangabu districts burst their banks, the first trucks in were, as they usually are, from the district disaster management office. Not far behind them, according to a company statement dated 18 May 2024, was a convoy from Hima Cement, the Kasese-based cement manufacturer owned by the Sarrai Group.
The donation was practical: food, blankets, cooking oil, soap and other essentials, distributed through the district administration to displaced families. It was also, in a wider sense, the sort of gesture that only lands honestly when the company doing it already lives in the community and is not simply visiting.
Sustainability at the centre
Two months later, at the 14th Annual Mineral Wealth Conference in Kampala, Hima Cement's Head of Legal and Company Secretary, Diana Nyakato, set out the company's approach to sustainability and community investment: education, agriculture, water and environmental restoration positioned not as a public-relations add-on but as central to how a heavy-industry operator earns its social licence to keep operating.
Cement is not a subtle industry. If you are going to work in a place, you owe that place more than a payroll.
Why it matters
Uganda's cement sector has expanded fast in the last decade on the back of the country's construction boom. That expansion has raised the ordinary set of concerns you would expect around dust, quarry water and truck traffic. Hima Cement's community and sustainability spend does not answer every one of those concerns. It does, however, model what the more responsible end of Uganda's heavy industry looks like when it takes host-community relations seriously.
- Hima Cement Donates Relief Items to Flood Victims - Hima Cement
- Uganda: Hima Cement, Centenary Bank back URCS humanitarian appeal - ReliefWeb
- Uganda Red Cross Society Delivers Relief to Flood Affected Families in Kasese District - Uganda Red Cross Society
