By Robert Asiimwe
The ground shook. The buildings largely stood. No significant loss of life was reported.
As a country we should be grateful, but
we should not be reassured.
On 31 May 2026, a magnitude 4.4 earthquake struck near Nakasongola in central Uganda. The event was recorded about 27 kilometres north of Nakasongola, at a depth of roughly 10 kilometres, and was felt across a wide area, including Kampala, Lira, Apac, Gulu, Masindi, Luwero, Wakiso, Mbale and Jinja.
Preliminary assessments reported no significant damage or loss of life.
That is good news. But the lesson should not be that Uganda is safe from earthquakes. The lesson should be that we have been given another opportunity to prepare better before a more damaging event tests the strength of our buildings, institutions and emergency systems.
And that distinction matters.
A magnitude 4.4 earthquake is not comparable with the stronger earthquakes in Uganda’s seismic history. The country has experienced earthquakes around magnitude 6 and above, including the devastating 1966 Toro/Rwenzori event and the 1994 Kisomoro earthquake. The precise magnitude assigned to historical earthquakes varies by catalogue and measurement scale, but the human consequences are not in dispute. The 1966 event killed about 160 people, injured roughly 1,300 and damaged or destroyed several structures; the 1994 Kisomoro earthquake killed eight people and caused substantial economic losses.
Uganda’s earthquake risk, therefore, is not theoretical. It is historical and very scientific.
Uganda sits within the broader East African Rift System, one of Africa’s major zones of active crustal deformation. Research has identified significant seismic activity in western Uganda and along geological structures including the Aswa Shear Zone. Scientific assessments have also shown that earthquake risk varies across the country.
The Nakasongola earthquake should therefore be treated not as a prediction of a bigger earthquake, but as a reminder of a known hazard.
That is the more responsible message.
Uganda’s earthquake-preparedness conversation did not begin with Nakasongola.
The country has been working for years to strengthen building regulation, seismic knowledge and disaster preparedness. President Yoweri Museveni’s Executive Order No. 1 of 2023 directed government to strengthen preparedness for earthquake risk, including building safety audits, earthquake-resistant construction standards, assessment and retrofitting of vulnerable structures, and disaster preparedness and response.
The National Building Review Board has also partnered with the Global Earthquake Model Foundation through the SERENE project to strengthen Uganda’s seismic evidence, risk modelling, engineering practice and construction safety.
More recently, government launched a Rapid Visual Screening programme for earthquake resilience in the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area.
That is welcome.
But it also raises a more uncomfortable question: What happens after we identify the vulnerable buildings?
Because an assessment is not resilience , a database is not resilience either. A report is not resilience.
Resilience begins when evidence changes decisions.
Uganda’s biggest earthquake risk may be hiding in plain sight
The case for urgency becomes stronger when we look beyond seismology to the state of the built environment.
Recent NBRB compliance monitoring found overall compliance with Uganda’s building control framework at 12.6 percent in the monitored building operations. Compliance with building permits was 0.6 percent, involvement of qualified professionals 0.9 percent, and compliance with basic safety requirements 15.2 percent.
These numbers should not be interpreted as saying that 87.4 percent of all buildings in Uganda are unsafe in an earthquake. They do not establish that.
They do, however, reveal a serious regulatory and information gap.
If buildings are being constructed without the required approvals or adequate professional involvement, it becomes much harder to know how those structures will perform when subjected to strong ground shaking.
That is the real concern.
And it is precisely why the government’s current building assessment efforts matter.
In August, the NBRB and Uganda Bureau of Statistics announced plans for Uganda’s first national baseline survey of buildings. The exercise is expected to cover 200,000 buildings across 11 cities, 31 municipalities and 135 district local governments, capturing information about building characteristics, structural condition, compliance, occupancy and location. NBRB says Uganda has more than 10 million buildings but no comprehensive national record of their condition.
That is an enormous information gap.
We cannot manage vulnerability that we cannot identify.
The screening is important. What follows is even more important.
Recent earthquake-resilience screening has already produced findings that deserve serious attention.
According to the NBRB, when Rapid Visual Screening was applied in Fort Portal City, nearly 90 percent of the buildings assessed required further investigation or intervention before they could be considered earthquake-safe. Among school buildings assessed in Mbarara, Fort Portal and Hoima, 6 percent required urgent structural intervention, while another 59 percent required deeper structural assessment.
These figures should prompt urgency, not panic.
Rapid Visual Screening is exactly what its name suggests: a rapid, preliminary way of identifying buildings that may require further investigation. It is not the same thing as a detailed structural engineering assessment.
That distinction is critical.
A building flagged for further investigation is not automatically a building that will collapse in an earthquake.
But a building that requires further investigation should not simply disappear into a report.
The next questions are the difficult ones: Will it be professionally assessed? Will it be strengthened? Will its occupancy be restricted? Will people need to be temporarily relocated? Who pays for the intervention? Who enforces the decision? And who checks that the recommended action was actually completed?
That is where Uganda’s earthquake preparedness will ultimately be judged.
It shouldn’t be a Kampala project
The decision to begin Rapid Visual Screening in Greater Kampala is understandable.
Kampala contains a huge concentration of people, buildings, economic activity and critical infrastructure. A major disaster in the metropolitan area could have consequences far beyond the capital.
But earthquake preparedness cannot stop at Kampala.
The NBRB itself has indicated that the screening will expand, particularly into areas with higher seismic activity in western Uganda.
That expansion is essential.
Uganda’s earthquake risk is geographically uneven. Western Uganda has historically experienced some of the country’s strongest seismic events, while recent events such as Nakasongola demonstrate that seismic activity is not exclusively a western Uganda story.
The question should therefore not simply be: Where do earthquakes happen?
It should be: Where could an earthquake cause the greatest loss of life, economic disruption and damage to critical infrastructure?
Thomsen are not always the same places.
A moderately seismic area with a vulnerable hospital, densely occupied apartment blocks or poorly constructed schools may deserve more urgent attention than a more active area with limited exposure.
But risk is shaped by hazard, exposure and vulnerability.
That should guide where Uganda puts its limited inspection, enforcement and investment resources.
Schools, hospitals and public buildings should come first
If Uganda is serious about earthquake resilience, public and high-occupancy buildings deserve particular attention.
Schools, hospitals, markets, high-occupancy residential buildings, government offices, bridges and other critical infrastructure cannot be treated like ordinary structures.
When they fail, the consequences multiply.
A school collapse does not simply destroy a building. It can kill children, traumatise families and disrupt an entire community.
A hospital that becomes unusable during an earthquake is not merely damaged infrastructure. It is a facility that cannot treat the injured when demand for medical care is at its highest.
Earthquake resilience must therefore be built into public investment decisions, not treated as an engineering issue to be considered after construction.
The law is only as strong as its enforcement
Uganda has standards. It has institutions. It has engineers, architects, surveyors, planners and building control officers. It has research. It has data projects. It has political directives.
The challenge is making these pieces work together.
Science must inform building standards. Building standards must inform approvals. Approvals must be enforced at construction sites. Inspections must have the authority and resources to identify violations. And where vulnerable structures are identified, there must be a mechanism and funding to fix them.
Otherwise, we risk creating an impressive architecture of paperwork without building actual resilience.
The public deserves to know
There is another part of this conversation that cannot be left to engineers and government agencies: public communication.
If a building is identified as requiring urgent structural intervention, occupants deserve clear information.
If a school needs structural assessment, parents and school administrators should know what that means and what is being done.
If a building is assessed as relatively safe, that information should also be communicated responsibly, without creating a false sense of absolute security.
Earthquakes cannot currently be predicted with the precision that allows authorities to tell the public exactly when and where a major earthquake will strike.
But earthquake risk can be assessed. Buildings can be screened. Structures can be strengthened. Building standards can be enforced. Emergency systems can be tested. Communities can be educated.
And lives can be saved.
That is where our attention should be.
The warning we should not waste
There is something uniquely unforgiving about earthquakes.
We cannot negotiate with them.
We cannot ask one to wait until the next budget cycle.
We cannot postpone preparedness until after the next disaster.
And we cannot know precisely when the next damaging earthquake will occur.
But we can decide what condition our buildings are in before the ground shakes.
We can decide whether schools are structurally sound. We can decide whether hospitals are resilient. We can decide whether building regulations are enforced. We can decide whether vulnerable structures are retrofitted. We can decide whether local governments have the capacity to inspect and enforce. And we can decide whether the information being collected today becomes action tomorrow.
That is why the most important question after Nakasongola is not, “When will the next big earthquake come?”
We cannot answer that reliably.
The better question is: “If a stronger earthquake struck tomorrow, which buildings would we already know are vulnerable, and what would we have done about them?”
That is the test Uganda should set for itself.
The Nakasongola earthquake caused no significant reported damage or loss of life. We should be thankful.
But a relatively harmless earthquake is not proof of safety.
It is an opportunity.
An opportunity to inspect before we have funerals. To strengthen before buildings fail. To enforce before negligence becomes tragedy. To educate before panic takes over. And to turn scientific evidence into practical action while there is still time.
Uganda does not need to wait for a devastating earthquake to prove that earthquake preparedness matters.
The ground has already reminded us.
Now the question is whether we will listen.
Robert Asiimwe is a Policy Analyst and Programme Development Specialist working at the intersection of policy advocacy, natural resources governance, WASH, climate resilience and social accountability.
The views expressed in this opinion are entirely his own and do not represent the views or positions of any institution orThe Earthquake Was Small. The Warning Wasn’t: Uganda Should Not Wait for a Bigger One
By Robert Asiimwe
The ground shook. The buildings largely stood. No significant loss of life was reported.
Uganda should be grateful.
But we should not be reassured.
On 31 May 2026, a magnitude 4.4 earthquake struck near Nakasongola in central Uganda. The event was recorded about 27 kilometres north of Nakasongola, at a depth of roughly 10 kilometres, and was felt across a wide area, including Kampala, Lira, Apac, Gulu, Masindi, Luwero, Wakiso, Mbale and Jinja. Preliminary assessments reported no significant damage or loss of life.
That is good news.
But the lesson should not be that Uganda is safe from earthquakes. The lesson should be that we have been given another opportunity to prepare before a more damaging event tests the strength of our buildings, institutions and emergency systems.
And that distinction matters.
A magnitude 4.4 earthquake is not comparable with the stronger earthquakes in Uganda’s seismic history. The country has experienced earthquakes around magnitude 6 and above, including the devastating 1966 Toro/Rwenzori event and the 1994 Kisomoro earthquake. The precise magnitude assigned to historical earthquakes varies by catalogue and measurement scale, but the human consequences are not in dispute: the 1966 event killed about 160 people, injured roughly 1,300 and damaged or destroyed more than 7,000 buildings; the 1994 Kisomoro earthquake killed eight people and caused substantial economic losses.
Uganda’s earthquake risk, therefore, is not theoretical. It is historical. And it is scientific.
Uganda sits within the broader East African Rift System, one of Africa’s major zones of active crustal deformation. Research has identified significant seismic activity in western Uganda and along geological structures including the Aswa Shear Zone. Scientific hazard assessments have also shown that earthquake risk varies across the country.
The Nakasongola earthquake should therefore be treated not as a prediction of a bigger earthquake, but as a reminder of a known hazard.
That is the more responsible message.
We already knew the risk
Uganda’s earthquake-preparedness conversation did not begin with Nakasongola.
The country has been working for years to strengthen building regulation, seismic knowledge and disaster preparedness. President Yoweri Museveni’s Executive Order No. 1 of 2023 directed government to strengthen preparedness for earthquake risk, including building safety audits, earthquake-resistant construction standards, assessment and retrofitting of vulnerable structures, and disaster preparedness and response.
The National Building Review Board has also partnered with the Global Earthquake Model Foundation through the SERENE project to strengthen Uganda’s seismic evidence, risk modelling, engineering practice and construction safety.
More recently, government launched a Rapid Visual Screening programme for earthquake resilience in the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area.
That is welcome.
But it also raises a more uncomfortable question: What happens after we identify the vulnerable buildings?
Because an assessment is not resilience. A database is not resilience. A report is not resilience.
Resilience begins when evidence changes decisions.
Uganda’s biggest earthquake risk may be hiding in plain sight
The case for urgency becomes stronger when we look beyond seismology to the state of the built environment.
Recent NBRB compliance monitoring found overall compliance with Uganda’s building control framework at 12.6 percent in the monitored building operations. Compliance with building permits was 0.6 percent, involvement of qualified professionals 0.9 percent, and compliance with basic safety requirements 15.2 percent.
These numbers should not be interpreted as saying that 87.4 percent of all buildings in Uganda are unsafe in an earthquake. They do not establish that.
They do, however, reveal a serious regulatory and information gap.
If buildings are being constructed without the required approvals or adequate professional involvement, it becomes much harder to know how those structures will perform when subjected to strong ground shaking.
That is the real concern.
And it is precisely why the government’s current building assessment efforts matter.
In August, the NBRB and Uganda Bureau of Statistics announced plans for Uganda’s first national baseline survey of buildings. The exercise is expected to cover 200,000 buildings across 11 cities, 31 municipalities and 135 district local governments, capturing information about building characteristics, structural condition, compliance, occupancy and location. NBRB says Uganda has more than 10 million buildings but no comprehensive national record of their condition.
That is an enormous information gap.
We cannot manage vulnerability that we cannot identify.
The screening is important. What follows is even more important.
Recent earthquake-resilience screening has already produced findings that deserve serious attention.
According to the NBRB, when Rapid Visual Screening was applied in Fort Portal City, nearly 90 percent of the buildings assessed required further investigation or intervention before they could be considered earthquake-safe. Among school buildings assessed in Mbarara, Fort Portal and Hoima, 6 percent required urgent structural intervention, while another 59 percent required deeper structural assessment.
These figures should prompt urgency, not panic.
Rapid Visual Screening is exactly what its name suggests: a rapid, preliminary way of identifying buildings that may require further investigation. It is not the same thing as a detailed structural engineering assessment.
That distinction is critical.
A building flagged for further investigation is not automatically a building that will collapse in an earthquake.
But a building that requires further investigation should not simply disappear into a report.
The next questions are the difficult ones: Will it be professionally assessed? Will it be strengthened? Will its occupancy be restricted? Will people need to be temporarily relocated? Who pays for the intervention? Who enforces the decision? And who checks that the recommended action was actually completed?
That is where Uganda’s earthquake preparedness will ultimately be judged.
Do not make earthquake preparedness a Kampala project
The decision to begin Rapid Visual Screening in Greater Kampala is understandable.
Kampala contains a huge concentration of people, buildings, economic activity and critical infrastructure. A major disaster in the metropolitan area could have consequences far beyond the capital.
But earthquake preparedness cannot stop at Kampala.
The NBRB itself has indicated that the screening will expand, particularly into areas with higher seismic activity in western Uganda.
That expansion is essential.
Uganda’s earthquake risk is geographically uneven. Western Uganda has historically experienced some of the country’s strongest seismic events, while recent events such as Nakasongola demonstrate that seismic activity is not exclusively a western Uganda story.
The question should therefore not simply be: Where do earthquakes happen?
It should be: Where could an earthquake cause the greatest loss of life, economic disruption and damage to critical infrastructure?
Those are not always the same places.
A moderately seismic area with a vulnerable hospital, densely occupied apartment blocks or poorly constructed schools may deserve more urgent attention than a more active area with limited exposure.
Risk is shaped by hazard, exposure and vulnerability.
That should guide where Uganda puts its limited inspection, enforcement and investment resources.
Schools, hospitals and public buildings should come first
If Uganda is serious about earthquake resilience, public and high-occupancy buildings deserve particular attention.
Schools, hospitals, markets, high-occupancy residential buildings, government offices, bridges and other critical infrastructure cannot be treated like ordinary structures.
When they fail, the consequences multiply.
A school collapse does not simply destroy a building. It can kill children, traumatise families and disrupt an entire community.
A hospital that becomes unusable during an earthquake is not merely damaged infrastructure. It is a facility that cannot treat the injured when demand for medical care is at its highest.
Earthquake resilience must therefore be built into public investment decisions, not treated as an engineering issue to be considered after construction.
The law is only as strong as its enforcement
Uganda has standards. It has institutions. It has engineers, architects, surveyors, planners and building control officers. It has research. It has data projects. It has political directives.
The challenge is making these pieces work together.
Science must inform building standards. Building standards must inform approvals. Approvals must be enforced at construction sites. Inspections must have the authority and resources to identify violations. And where vulnerable structures are identified, there must be a mechanism and funding to fix them.
Otherwise, we risk creating an impressive architecture of paperwork without building actual resilience.
The public deserves to know
There is another part of this conversation that cannot be left to engineers and government agencies: public communication.
If a building is identified as requiring urgent structural intervention, occupants deserve clear information.
If a school needs structural assessment, parents and school administrators should know what that means and what is being done.
If a building is assessed as relatively safe, that information should also be communicated responsibly, without creating a false sense of absolute security.
Earthquakes cannot currently be predicted with the precision that allows authorities to tell the public exactly when and where a major earthquake will strike.
But earthquake risk can be assessed. Buildings can be screened. Structures can be strengthened. Building standards can be enforced. Emergency systems can be tested. Communities can be educated.
And lives can be saved.
That is where our attention should be.
The warning we should not waste
There is something uniquely unforgiving about earthquakes.
We cannot negotiate with them.
We cannot ask one to wait until the next budget cycle.
We cannot postpone preparedness until after the next disaster.
And we cannot know precisely when the next damaging earthquake will occur.
But we can decide what condition our buildings are in before the ground shakes.
We can decide whether schools are structurally sound. We can decide whether hospitals are resilient. We can decide whether building regulations are enforced. We can decide whether vulnerable structures are retrofitted. We can decide whether local governments have the capacity to inspect and enforce. And we can decide whether the information being collected today becomes action tomorrow.
That is why the most important question after Nakasongola is not, “When will the next big earthquake come?”
We cannot answer that reliably.
The better question is: “If a stronger earthquake struck tomorrow, which buildings would we already know are vulnerable—and what would we have done about them?”
That is the test Uganda should set for itself.
The Nakasongola earthquake caused no significant reported damage or loss of life. We should be thankful.
But a relatively harmless earthquake is not proof of safety.
It is an opportunity.
An opportunity to inspect before we have funerals. To strengthen before buildings fail. To enforce before negligence becomes tragedy. To educate before panic takes over. And to turn scientific evidence into practical action while there is still time.
Uganda does not need to wait for a devastating earthquake to prove that earthquake preparedness matters.
The ground has already reminded us.
Now the question is whether we will listen.
The author is a Policy Analyst and Programme Development Specialist working at the intersection of policy advocacy, natural resources governance, WASH, climate resilience and social accountability.
The views expressed in this opinion are entirely his own and do not represent the views or positions of any institution or organisation with which he is affiliated.
