Across Uganda, Rotary is quietly building young leaders, transforming communities, and proving that service is both a habit and an inheritance.
When people think of Rotary, they often picture the formal dinners and the banners. What they miss is what happens in the communities in between. The clinic that stays open, the road that becomes safer, the young person who finds a direction they did not know was available to them.
Rotary has been present in Uganda for seventy years. That longevity is not accidental. It is the result of generation after generation choosing to show up for their neighbours, for young people, and for a vision of community that refuses to be measured only in what is convenient.
Through Rotaract, thousands of young Ugandans have found their first experience of organised service and their first real leadership role. I know this from the inside. I was installed as President of the Rotaract Club of Makerere University in 1992, and again as President of the Rotaract Club of Kampala City in 1999. Those experiences did not just teach me about service. They prepared me for life.
This year, my daughter Namulinde will be installed as a Rotaract President at the University of Oklahoma. As I said at my installation: “If that is not evidence that Rotary is a family tradition, I don’t know what is.” Service, when modelled consistently, becomes something children absorb without being told.
This year, the Rotary Club of Kampala deepens its work along the Nakawuka Road corridor covering road safety, water and sanitation, maternal and child health, and environmental protection. We continue supporting the Rotary Hospital in Mukono, the Sam Owori Skilling Project in Tororo, Kapir Health Centre in Teso, and the Martin Aliker Resource Centre in Gulu. These are not pilot programmes. They are commitments that have survived multiple presidencies and multiple changes in national circumstance.
When I described the ambition behind Strategy 777, I was deliberate about what the numbers represent: “These are not numbers on a spreadsheet, they are children receiving education, families gaining access to clean water, mothers receiving healthcare, young people acquiring skills and communities finding hope. However behind every number is a human story and that is what truly matters.”
This is an open invitation to everyone. Rotary is not a club for people who have already arrived, it is a place where people become. For young Ugandans especially, it offers something increasingly rare, a structured community committed to something beyond personal advancement. When I invited my board to serve, none of them asked what they would gain. As I told those gathered at my installation, that spirit is the very essence of Rotary.
I close with what I believe to be the truest thing I said that evening: “Tonight is a story. A story about service. A story about friendship. A story about ordinary people who choose, every day, to do extraordinary things for others.” That choice is what Rotary asks of us. It is also what Uganda’s communities deserve.
