Municipal Regulatory Systems and the Scale-Up of Clean Cooking in Uganda

Uganda’s clean cooking agenda sits at the intersection of energy, environment, urban management, and trade policy. The National Energy Policy (2023) and the draft National Clean Cooking Strategy provide the overarching sector direction, while NDPIV and the Tenfold Growth Strategy embed clean cooking access within Uganda’s economic transformation agenda. At the local level, the Trade Licensing Act (Cap 101) devolves trading licence administration to urban authorities, and the Markets Act 2023 introduced digital, cashless, item-based offloading fees for trading in public markets, replacing earlier trade-licence-based arrangements. For Kampala specifically, the KCCA Act (Cap 105), the Maintenance of Law-and-Order Ordinance (2006), and the City Outdoor Advertising Policy (2008) frame how trading, public space use, and outdoor advertising are administered. Environmental obligations sit under the National Environment Act (Cap 181), which NEMA administers. Each of these instruments is legitimate and serves a clear public purpose; the issue this brief addresses is how they combine in practice where clean cooking enterprises engage urban consumers.