Uganda is among a dozen countries invited to high-level Trade over Aid talks on the sidelines of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Vice President Jessica Alupo, who heads Uganda’s five-member delegation to the assembly, and Foreign Affairs Minister Adonia Ayebare are expected to attend the meeting on Friday at the Lotte New York Palace hotel in Manhattan. It is hosted by US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau.
The delegation is smaller than usual. Only five Ugandan officials were granted US visas for the assembly, the Daily Monitor reported on Tuesday, against the 20 to 30 Kampala typically sends. Mr Ayebare, who became foreign minister in August, was Uganda’s permanent representative to the UN from 2017 until this year.
Trade over Aid is a free-market initiative proposed by the administration of US President Donald Trump. It aims to scale back developed countries’ annual aid commitments in favour of trade.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio first set out the idea in July 2025 as a new foreign aid vision, built on “trade over aid, opportunity over dependency, and investment over assistance”. He published it on 1 July, the day the US Agency for International Development stopped administering foreign aid.
The State Department has argued that the traditional aid model has not worked for either party. Under that model, Washington and other donor governments transfer ever-increasing aid to recipient governments.
In April the US Mission to the UN sent member states’ missions, including Uganda’s, a circular: a non-binding declaration of five principles, which they were invited to sign in order to join the caucus. A launch ceremony followed at the New York Stock Exchange on 27 April, led by Michael Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN.
By mid-July, 46 countries had signed, according to the State Department. Uganda is one of six from Africa, alongside Djibouti, Kenya, Lesotho, Morocco and Nigeria. The others include Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Serbia, Singapore, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ecuador, Honduras and Fiji.
The declaration’s five principles are:
- Sovereign nations own their economic development. Each “must chart its own path to progress” by mobilising its own resources, and development aid “should promote national self-reliant growth”.
- Free-market policies “provide the surest route to economic prosperity”. The declaration names “limited regulation, low taxation, multiple energy sources, private property rights, sanctity of contracts, and a trusted judiciary”. It also calls for policies that “reject equality of outcome and strive for equality of opportunity”.
- The most effective development assistance is profitable trade partnership between private sectors. Government aid, it says, has “often created dependency, inefficiency, and corruption”, and “it was private business that developed all the world’s successful economies, not government aid”.
- Free-market reforms attract foreign trade and capital, and benefit domestic entrepreneurs.
- Multilateral organisations can help in “a supporting role”, since “prescribing one-size-fits-all, multi-year plans has not been successful”.
For Uganda, the move away from aid is already under way. In December last year, Kampala and Washington signed a five-year, $2.3bn health agreement. The US will contribute $1.7bn, and Uganda has pledged to raise its own health spending by $577mn.
The trade side is less settled, however. Uganda has been excluded from the African Growth and Opportunity Act since January 2024, after Washington cited human-rights concerns over the Anti-Homosexuality Act. The act gives eligible African goods duty-free access to the US market. Congress renewed it in February until 31 December, but Uganda was not among this year’s beneficiaries and is lobbying to be reinstated.
