What To Make Of Travel Advisories To Uganda

It is very hard to find a positive travel advisory for Uganda unless a tourist is making one. No foreign government seems to advise people to visit Uganda because of disease outbreaks such as Mpox and Ebola. On top of this, Uganda is often tagged a high terrorist threat destination. If it is your first time to hear about Uganda, obviously, you would reconsider your visit because of these advisories. The question is how do you navigate the tourist travel advisory along with the foreign government travel advisory so that you get a proper idea of what is happening in Uganda?

A woman with her bag on the chest walks through down town Kampala PHOTO BY COLLEB MUGUME

First and foremost, all things that are said are true but context matters. For instance when they speak about the high crime rates in Uganda, it should be noted that most of the fatal crimes that involve killing people are mostly not about robbery, they are mostly about relationship disagreements. This is not to say that fatal theft crimes do not happen, but they do not happen to the degree that someone might think they do.

For instance, you can stay in Uganda for a whole year without hearing a single gunshot. In fact when people hear gun shots, they often mistake them for tire bursts. No one gets scared because they have heard a gun shot simply because it is rarely related to any issue. In order to get a better picture of how life is like in Uganda, consider listening to former travelers because chances are high that they travelled during a time that such negative advisories were already in place.

Warnings And Insurance

This is the most delicate part of travel. Even when a person is willing to travel, as long as their local insurance company cannot promise to cover them when they visit a particular destination such as Queen Elizabeth National Park, then people will obviously cancel their trips. In this case, we cannot just come up and say simply travel without insurance, but how about considering local travel insurance to cover for the part your international insurance is not covering you for?

It is important to note that it is on very rare occasions that the insurance company will have to compensate you because for the biggest part, the trips usually move as planned. The current challenge is that the government has not emphasized or created a way out for people who wish to travel but are limited by their local insurance.

Security and Safety

If someone wakes up and tells you that Uganda is very safe, they will be lying to you just like a person who says Uganda is not safe. There are a lot of things that come into play when we speak about safety. Uganda is not just a town. It is a country that is made up of locations that are considered safe to a certain degree and unsafe too.

The border of Uganda and South Sudan as well as Turkana border area is often considered unsafe because it is one place in Uganda that you are likely to head a lot of gunshots than any other part of the country. But regardless of this happening in the background, the place is not labelled unsafe because the risk is minimal. Besides this part of the country, the other parts can be considered safe not because of first class security but because of how rare for unrest to spark off.

If you are only looking at the Uganda’s statistics, it might look unsafe. But if you compare with some of the other communities may be in USA or UK; then it will turn out to be safer because of how isolated the incident is.

In conclusion, it is important to consider what the travel advisories say but in most cases they are simply generalizing everything. If you are interested in visiting the country, do not hesitate because it is way more secure than most major cities around the world.