Uganda, and the way in

Uganda is where we work. Our customers are businesses in Kampala, Jinja, Mbarara and the towns between them — importers, manufacturers, retailers and traders who buy from Europe, or want to and have not found a way to do it safely.

Uganda has no coastline, so every consignment arrives twice: once at a port, and again at a border. Goods come in through Mombasa on the Northern Corridor, or through Dar es Salaam on the Central Corridor.

That second leg is the one that gets left out of a quotation. A price to the port is a price for part of the journey, and the part remaining contains the border post, the inland haulage and the storage clock. We plan to the delivery address instead.

Uganda is a member of the East African Community, which is why the same customs treatment recurs across the region.

Kenya is on our route rather than on our client list. Mombasa is where a large share of the goods we handle enter the region, and the Northern Corridor from there to Kampala is a road we work on constantly — so we know the port, the paperwork and the people at it.

We are not yet taking on Kenyan businesses as sourcing clients. Saying otherwise would mean selling a market we serve in transit as a market we serve properly, and those are different things.

If you are a business in Kenya and want to buy from Europe, write to us anyway. We will tell you honestly whether we can help you now or whether you should wait.

Tanzania is the other way in. Dar es Salaam and the Central Corridor are the alternative routing to Kampala, and which of the two corridors a consignment takes is a decision we make at booking rather than a fact we accept.

As with Kenya, we are not yet taking on Tanzanian businesses as sourcing clients. The corridor we know well; the market we do not know well enough to promise anything about it.