Jinja was proclaimed a township on 26 June 1906 (under the 1903 Township Ordinance) and declared a municipality in 1957. The Local Government Act Chapter 243 requires that a municipality seeking to gain city status ‘must have a population of 500,000 inhabitants. It must also have the capacity to meet the cost of delivering services for the population, a master plan, sufficient water sources and an administrative unit’, conditions that Jinja fully meets. The Busoga Consortium is thus routing for the elevation of Jinja Municipality to city status. The elevation of Jinja to city status will create economic opportunities due to the proposed subregional ring road network and intra-city connective infrastructure.

At the national level, the elevation of Jinja will reduce the strain and congestion in Uganda’s only city – Kampala – cutting down on rural-urban migration as more alternative opportunities will emerge in the newly created Jinja City. This infrastructure is essential to making Jinja City’s markets accessible to other districts as well as to the export markets. According to the World Bank, ‘such investments can amplify the economic gains generated through the process of agglomeration while offsetting congestion costs’.41 The elevation of Jinja will be a significant shift to the realisation of the country’s economic objectives because incomes are likely to rise as Jinja City gears up to accommodate its industrial base that will come with a range of new services sectors, thus increasing the workforce employed in both industry and services relative to that of the agricultural sector.