Uganda's first privately financed transmission project reaches construction start.

For a generator in western Uganda waiting on the grid to carry what it produces, the substation work it depends on has moved from a licence on file to a construction start. The Electricity Regulatory Authority reports that Amari Power Transmission SMC Limited has broken ground in Mbarara District, beginning the first independent power transmission project on the continent.

The scope is four high voltage substations: one at Tororo in the east, one at Nkenda in the west, and the pair serving Mbarara, north and south. The regulator licensed the project in 2025, the first consent issued under its "Independent Power Transmission" framework, which became available after the Electricity Act was amended in 2022. The authority also calls it the first privately financed electricity transmission scheme in Africa to have reached financial close.

That framework sits beside, not inside, the familiar independent power producer model. On this reading, the party being paid here is paid to move electricity rather than to generate it, which makes evacuation capacity a financed asset with its own build programme and its own counterparty. Amari leans on its parent, Gridworks Development Partners LLP, a British International Investment company with transmission and distribution work elsewhere on the continent.

The regulator expects the finished upgrades to firm up reliability, let plants already running and those still to come move more of their output, and underpin exports into the wider region. The transmission company says the work fits its own 2025 to 2030 plan and its case for serving rising demand, industrial load and cross-border trade.

The implication is that a constraint around Mbarara and Nkenda now carries a construction schedule rather than a planning intention, which is a firmer thing to test a connection or curtailment clause against. What the notice does not carry is a commercial operation date. Until one is published, the energisation year remains the open variable for anyone pricing evacuation risk on a western Uganda asset or negotiating an offtake that assumes the upgrade lands on time.