Community Visit
Community Visit. The Kampala that appears in travel photographs is a city of hills and landmarks — the green dome of the Bahá’í Temple, the red brick of Rubaga Cathedral, the minaret of the National Mosque catching the evening light. It is a real Kampala, and it is worth seeing. But the Kampala that the majority of the city’s people actually inhabit is a different landscape entirely: the informal settlements and working communities that have grown in the valleys between the hills, along the drainage channels, on the swampy ground that nobody else wanted, where approximately sixty percent of the city’s population lives, works, raises children, builds small businesses, and gets on with the daily business of life with a resourcefulness and sociality that the hilltop view cannot show you.
A community visit in Kampala — done with the right guide, the right approach, and the right intention — is one of the most illuminating travel experiences available in East Africa. It is also one of the most frequently misunderstood. This page is here to explain what it is, what it is not, how it works, why it matters, and what you can expect to encounter when you step off the main road and into the lanes of Katanga, Bwaise, Katwe, Kisenyi, or Kamwokya.
First: The Question You Should Ask
Before we describe the communities themselves or the experience of visiting them, it is worth spending a moment on the question that thoughtful visitors almost always ask — and that distinguishes a good community visit from a poor one.
Is it ethical to visit communities where people are living in poverty?
The honest answer is: it depends entirely on how it is done.
There is a version of urban community tourism — sometimes called “poverty tourism” or “slum tourism” — that operates like a safari: visitors are driven through in vehicles, stare out of windows at living conditions they find dramatic, take photographs of strangers without consent, feel briefly grateful for their own circumstances, and leave without having contributed anything to the community or learned anything that required actual contact with its people. This version is ethically indefensible, and we do not offer it.
The version we offer is different in every important respect. It starts with a community guide who lives in the neighborhood — not an outside guide narrating someone else’s experience, but a resident who has grown up here, who knows the families, who has a relationship with the schools and the community organizations and the small businesses along the way. It proceeds on foot, at a pace that allows actual conversation, actual encounter, actual exchange. Photography is guided by consent and by your guide’s knowledge of who will welcome it and who will not. A portion of every tour fee goes directly to community projects — not through a distant charity but through the organizations your guide will introduce you to during the walk. And it ends with an understanding of the community as a place where people live, rather than a place where poverty happens.
The ethical question is real and should be taken seriously. The answer, in this context, is that a community visit done this way is one of the most respectful forms of tourism that exists — because it treats people as the experts on their own lives, involves them as guides and hosts rather than subjects, and ensures that the economic benefit of your visit reaches them directly.
The Communities: Five Neighborhoods, Five Stories
Kampala’s informal settlements are not interchangeable. Each one has a distinct history, a distinct character, a distinct population, and a distinct set of challenges and strengths. The communities we visit most commonly include the following.
Katanga — Between the University and the Hospital
Wedged in the narrow floodplain between Makerere University — one of East Africa’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning — and Mulago Hospital, Uganda’s national referral hospital, Katanga is simultaneously one of Kampala’s most densely populated informal settlements and one of its most strategically located. The proximity of the university is not incidental: many of Katanga’s residents are students who cannot afford university accommodation, domestic workers employed by university staff, and small-business operators serving the university community. The result is a neighborhood with a remarkably high density of educated, ambitious young people living in very constrained material circumstances — a combination that produces extraordinary entrepreneurial energy.
The settlement has two zones, Busia and Kimwanyi, divided by a narrow drainage channel that floods during heavy rains. The alleys between the houses are narrow enough that two people cannot pass without turning sideways; the houses themselves are built from unburnt bricks, mud, and corrugated iron, constructed wherever space is available, which means the settlement has no grid and no consistent orientation. Navigation without a guide is genuinely difficult. With one, it is one of the most vivid walks available in Kampala.
Community organisations operating in Katanga focus primarily on education and health: a number of NGOs run health outreach programmes connected to Mulago Hospital’s proximity, while youth groups and women’s savings cooperatives (chamas) operate throughout the settlement. On a visit, you are likely to encounter a small school or crèche, a tailoring workshop, a food stall where women are cooking for the lunchtime crowd, and the particular social texture of a community that has built its own logic and its own institutions entirely from its own resources.
Bwaise — Resilience on the Swamp
Bwaise sits on the northern edge of Kampala, built over low-lying swampy ground that floods reliably during the rainy seasons. This is not a marginal fact about the neighbourhood — it is a central one. Bwaise floods. The drainage channels that run between the houses carry human and household waste in dry weather and overflow in wet weather, bringing waterborne disease into contact with the children playing at the margins. The residents of Bwaise know this. They have always known it. And they have built a community here anyway, on ground that more powerful people did not want, because there was nowhere else to go.
What you find in Bwaise, alongside the material challenges that are real and should not be romanticised, is one of the most remarkable demonstrations of community self-organisation that Kampala contains. AFFCAD — Action for Fundamental Change and Development was founded in 2009 by four young men from the neighbourhood — Jaffar among them — who grew up in Bwaise and decided to address its problems from within rather than waiting for government attention that had not come. AFFCAD now runs a primary school serving over 120 children, a vocational training centre for older teenagers and young adults (the skills taught include tailoring, hairdressing, and motor mechanics — trades that can be practiced on the small scale that Bwaise’s economy supports), and water and sanitation projects addressing the flooding and drainage problems at the community level. A visit to Bwaise typically includes a meeting with the AFFCAD team and a walk through their projects — the school, the training centre, the community meetings happening around them — guided by someone who helped build all of it from the ground up.
A portion of the visit fee goes directly to AFFCAD’s operational fund.
Katwe — The Workshop of Kampala
Katwe, located about three kilometers southwest of the city centre in Makindye Division, is the neighborhood that best illustrates the distance between the label “slum” and the reality of what is happening inside it. Since Uganda’s independence in 1962, Katwe has been Kampala’s centre of artisanal industry: the place where mechanics, metal fabricators, electricians, and engineers — many of them self-taught, many of them working from a tradition of improvisation that the Baganda call Magezi ga Baganda, the Wisdom of the Baganda — have built a manufacturing economy from scrap, salvage, and ingenuity.
In 2007, Katwe was estimated to employ over 3,000 artisans and metal fabricators operating from more than 800 individual small enterprises. These workshops assemble minibuses from component parts, fabricate agricultural machinery, repair electronics that would elsewhere be discarded, and manufacture tools and parts that would cost many times more if imported. The Katwe artisans now collaborate formally with Makerere University’s Faculty of Technology — the university up the hill working with the workshop down the hill, each with something the other needs. It is one of the most useful partnerships in Ugandan industry.
Katwe is also the neighbourhood made famous internationally by the 2016 Disney film Queen of Katwe — the true story of Phiona Mutesi, a young girl from the settlement who learned chess at a community programme run by missionary coach Robert Katende and became one of Uganda’s most celebrated chess players, competing internationally despite having grown up in material circumstances that most of her international opponents could not imagine. The film, starring Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo, was shot partly on location in Katwe and brought the neighbourhood’s story to a global audience. Walking through Katwe with a guide who grew up here is to walk through the setting of that story — the narrow lanes, the community chess programme still operating, the workshops where the ingenuity that the film captured is still at work every day.
Kisenyi — The City’s Multicultural Heart
Kisenyi occupies a particularly interesting position: an informal settlement in the very heart of Kampala, bordered by Nakasero to the north, Mengo to the west, and Old Kampala to the east — surrounded, in other words, by some of the city’s most historically significant landmarks. It is also one of the most culturally diverse neighbourhoods in Uganda, home to a population that includes Ugandans from every region of the country alongside Somali, Rwandan, Ethiopian, South Sudanese, and Congolese communities who have built their own social worlds within the settlement’s boundaries. Walking through Kisenyi is to hear half a dozen languages in a single block and to encounter culinary traditions from across the region in the small restaurants and food stalls that serve each community.
Kisenyi’s population includes a significant number of refugees and asylum seekers — people whose presence in this neighbourhood reflects Uganda’s long-standing open-door policy toward those fleeing conflict in neighbouring countries, a policy that has made Uganda home to one of the largest refugee populations in Africa. A community visit to Kisenyi includes encounters with this reality: the Somali merchant community whose wholesale trade connects Kisenyi to the rest of the city’s economy; the Congolese families who arrived after displacement and have built lives here; and the Ugandan residents who have grown up alongside all of them, in a social experiment in shared space that functions, day to day, rather better than most outside observers expect.
Kamwokya — Where Artists and Politicians Come From
Kamwokya, bordering Kololo and Bukoto in the northeast of the city centre, carries a particular cultural weight. It is the childhood home and political base of Bobi Wine — the musician-turned-politician (born Robert Kyagulanyi) who has become one of Uganda’s most prominent voices for democratic change, running against President Museveni in the 2021 elections and building a mass movement from a constituency rooted in exactly the kind of urban informal community that Kamwokya represents. The National Unity Platform headquarters is located here, and the connection between the neighbourhood’s experience of urban poverty, the music that grew from it, and the political consciousness that emerged from the music, is one of the most interesting and unusual stories in contemporary African politics.
Kamwokya is also a neighbourhood of musicians, artists, and creatives — people who have used cultural production as a form of both livelihood and advocacy, whose work has given the community a visibility and a voice that purely material stories of deprivation could not produce. A visit to Kamwokya is as much a cultural encounter as a community one: the murals on the walls, the recording studios in the lanes, the youth arts organisations that continue to train the next generation of musicians and visual artists from the community.
What Actually Happens on a Community Visit
A community visit with Kampala City Tours is a walking experience of two to four hours, led by a resident guide from the community being visited. It is not scripted and it is not a show. What happens will depend on the day, on who is home, on what is being cooked for lunch, on whether the vocational school is in session — on the contingency of a morning in a living community rather than the predictability of a curated tour.
Within that contingency, there are consistent elements. You will walk the lanes — not the main roads, which tell you nothing, but the internal paths that connect houses and small businesses and community spaces. You will be introduced to people your guide knows: the woman who runs the tailoring cooperative, the young man who completed the mechanics course and is now working from his own small workshop, the teacher at the community school, the family whose home is close enough to the drainage channel that they moved their possessions to the upper shelves before last month’s rains. These are not performances. They are introductions.
You will be invited to look at what the community has built for itself — the organisations, the schools, the savings groups, the training programmes — and to understand the gap between what exists and what government provision supplies, which is the gap that these organisations fill. You will be asked questions as well as answering them: visitors to these communities are often more interesting to residents than the residents initially seem to visitors, and the exchange, once it gets going, tends to be more balanced than outsiders expect.
You will eat something — a rolex from a street stall, sweet potatoes from a woman cooking over a charcoal brazier, a cup of African tea in someone’s doorway. The food is good. The company is better.
You will not take photographs of people without asking. Your guide will advise you on this at the start of the walk and will help you navigate the moments when it feels appropriate and the moments when it does not. The general principle is: photograph places and things freely; photograph people only with direct, spoken consent. This is not complicated, and most people, when asked, say yes — many with pleasure.
What the Visit Contributes
A portion of every community visit fee is allocated directly to community projects in the neighborhood visited — the AFFCAD school fund in Bwaise, the youth arts programme in Kamwokya, the women’s cooperative in Katanga. The allocation is transparent: your guide will tell you which project your visit is supporting and what the current fund is being used for.
This is not a charity arrangement. It is a recognition that the economic value generated by community tourism should flow to the communities that make it possible, in addition to the guides who lead it. The communities visited have agreed to participate on this basis; they are not subjects of someone else’s tour product but partners in an arrangement whose terms they have shaped.
Practical Guide
Duration: A standard community walk runs two to three hours. Extended visits that include a school or vocational training centre visit, lunch in the community, and a longer conversation with community organisation leaders can run to four hours.
Physical requirements: Community visits involve walking on uneven ground, narrow lanes, and occasionally wet or muddy paths. Closed, comfortable shoes are essential. The pace is slow — this is a walk designed for looking and talking, not for covering distance. Most people of ordinary fitness find the walk entirely manageable.
What to wear: Casual, respectful clothing. Nothing that signals conspicuous wealth. Closed shoes. A light layer in the morning. Leave expensive jewellery at your hotel.
What to bring: A small amount of cash in Uganda shillings for street food and any craft purchases you may want to make from community artisans. Your phone, in a pocket rather than in hand. A genuinely open disposition.
Group size: Community visits work best in small groups — a maximum of six people per guide. Larger groups disrupt the social fabric of the community and make genuine encounter impossible. We do not take groups of more than six into any community. Private visits (one to four people) offer the most flexibility and the deepest encounter.
Combining with other sites: The community visit works well as either the morning or afternoon component of a full Kampala day. Katanga and Bwaise are near the Uganda Museum and Kasubi Tombs respectively, making natural geographic pairings. Katwe is a short distance from Rubaga Cathedral and the Kabaka’s Palace. Ask us about building a full day that combines a community visit with other Kampala landmarks.
Pricing: Community visits are priced at $35 USD per person for a standard two to three-hour walk, including the community contribution. Extended visits with additional programme elements (school visit, lunch, extended community organisation meeting) are priced at $55 USD per person.
A Final Word on the Word “Slum”
The word is used — including in this article — because it is the word in common use and because avoiding it produces circumlocutions that obscure more than they clarify. But it is worth noting what it does not capture. Katanga and Bwaise and Katwe and Kisenyi and Kamwokya are not defined by their material constraints, though those constraints are real and their consequences are serious. They are defined by the people who live in them — by the ingenuity of the Katwe metalworkers, the community-building of AFFCAD in Bwaise, the multicultural negotiation happening daily in Kisenyi, the music and politics emerging from Kamwokya, the ambition of the students in Katanga who attend Makerere by day and return here in the evening. These are not exceptional stories. They are the ordinary stories of these communities, happening every day, visible to anyone who comes to look with attention rather than pity.
That is what a community visit is for.
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