What happens when a country discovers it has what the entire continent needs, but hasn’t yet realised the full value of what it’s sitting on?
Last year, I watched a group of Norwegian distance runners complete a training session at 2,000 metres above sea level in southwestern Uganda. They were not there by accident. I believe they chose Uganda because they understood something the rest of the continent is still catching up on, which is Uganda not trying to be a sports tourism destination; rather, we are becoming the one that simply works.
The global sports tourism market moves where results happen, where infrastructure meets authenticity, where cost and quality align in ways competitors can’t replicate. Uganda’s advantage isn’t singular; it’s systemic.
Our geography is superb for training: our highlands offer the altitude sweet spot that builds aerobic capacity without the extreme conditions that injure athletes.
But geography alone doesn’t win markets.
What wins markets is when geography meets hospitality, meets infrastructure, meets a government that understands the difference between having a resource and actually monetizing it.
The Rwenzori Marathon proves this. What started as a niche ultra-running event has evolved into something larger, a magnet for serious endurance athletes from across the globe who come not just for the race, but for the training window beforehand. They stay longer, spend more, and most importantly, they tell other athletes.
This is how destination markets are built. Not through one-off spectacle, but through recurring pilgrimage.
Uganda delivers comparable or superior facilities for $60-$120. That’s economic leverage.
A team of 20 athletes training for three months represents nearly $200,000 in direct spending plus indirect economic activity through hospitality, restaurants, transportation, and services.
Scale this across dozens of teams, dozens of sports disciplines, and suddenly we’re talking about a revenue stream that rivals traditional tourism segments but requires fundamentally different marketing strategies.
But here’s what excites me more than the numbers. 2027, Uganda is co-hosting Afcon.
That’s not just a football tournament. That’s 73 matches. That’s one million tourists descending on our infrastructure.
That’s the world watching how Uganda runs a continental event. We have a three-year runway to position ourselves as a sports destination that can deliver at continental and international scale. Afcon isn’t an endpoint. It’s a launchpad.
Think strategically about what happens after Afcon. The world will have seen our stadiums, our security, our hospitality capacity, our organisational competence. Teams will have established relationships with our facilities, our hotels, our transport networks.
Athletes competing in 2027 will have experienced Uganda at its most visible moment.
That awareness, that confidence, becomes the foundation for the next phase – hence positioning Uganda as the go-to destination for serious athletes across every sport discipline.
This requires intentionality.
We need targeted investment in specialised facilities that become magnets for specific sports. We need partnerships with sports science institutions that position Uganda as intellectually credible, not just geographically convenient. We need to recruit the coaches, facilities managers, and sports medicine professionals who transform casual visits into deliberate destination choices.
The window is open. But windows close.
The athletes are already coming. The demand is real. Afcon is coming. The question is whether we’ll move fast enough to own this market before others realise what we have.