Supervision in Uganda's last-mile distribution networks

A sales supervisor at a distributor's depot on the edge of Kampala spends Friday afternoon reconstructing the week. Eleven representatives have been out since Monday on routes through trading centres he has not visited this year. What comes back is a stack of ruled call sheets, some filled in at the counter and some that evening from memory, a carbon-copy invoice book, and a cash position that will not quite reconcile against the stock that left the store. He knows what went out. He knows what was banked. Everything in between reaches him as a description, over the phone, from the people it describes.

Multiply that depot across the country. The agro-input dealers a supplier serves out of Masindi. The soft drinks routes worked from a Mbale depot. The soap and detergent pickup covering Arua and the trading centres north of it. Uganda's consumer goods reach their last mile through field agents on motorcycles and in pickups, selling into shops the companies behind them have never counted, and almost none of that work is observed while it is happening.

The reach itself is a genuine achievement and it deserves saying first. The Uganda Bureau of Statistics counted 340,926 retail businesses in its 2019/20 Census of Business Establishments, alongside 26,273 wholesale businesses and 20,980 in vehicle and motorcycle sale and repair — 388,179 trade businesses employing 1,032,931 people. A bottle of soda and a sachet of painkillers get to a trading centre in Karamoja, where the census found 3,532 businesses of any kind, and they get there without anyone upstream recording which shop took them. That happens because somebody rides there.

THE OUTLETS ARE COUNTED ONCE A DECADE

Uganda has taken a full census of its business establishments three times, in 2001/02, in 2010/11 and in 2019/20, roughly nine years apart. That is long enough for a trading centre to double, a road to be tarmacked and a generation of shops to open and close: the 2019/20 round found 38.8 per cent more trade businesses than the 279,715 counted in 2010/11, so the churn isn't theoretical. A sales director setting territories and call frequencies for next year works from a picture assembled before the pandemic, of a lopsided geography in which 34.1 per cent of trade businesses sat in Buganda and 23.2 per cent in Kampala, the rest across sub-regions a head office visits rarely and audits almost never.

WHAT THE STANDARD EVIDENCE LEAVES OUT

The difficulty compounds, because these outlets are too small to appear in the surveys everyone else relies on. That census classed 90.2 per cent of trade businesses as informal, its working definition being fewer than five employees. The World Bank's Enterprise Survey, the standard reference on Uganda's business environment, makes firms under five employees ineligible by design; its 2025 Uganda round interviewed 605 firms, 149 of them in retail. So the retail universe a field team spends its life in front of is described, in that evidence base, by a sample smaller than one distributor's route list.

THE LAST MILE BEHAVES AS IF NOBODY IS WATCHING

What an unobserved counter does has been measured in Uganda, though in a different trade. Tessa Bold, Kayuki Kaizzi, Jakob Svensson and David Yanagizawa-Drott sent covert shoppers to buy 369 samples of urea fertiliser from 129 randomly selected retail shops in two of the main maize-growing regions. Writing in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2017, they reported that 30 per cent of the nitrogen was missing on average, and that branded hybrid maize seed bought the same way contained less than half authentic seed. Agricultural inputs are not fast-moving consumer goods and the finding shouldn't be stretched into one, but it is the closest measured account this country has of what a chain does where nobody upstream can see it.

Credit makes the blindness expensive rather than merely untidy. The 2025 Enterprise Survey found 34.2 per cent of Ugandan firms using supplier or customer credit to finance working capital, against 24.9 per cent across Sub-Saharan Africa, so goods routinely move down the chain ahead of the money for them. Scoring management practices among firms of at least twenty workers, the same survey gave Ugandan managers 16.6 out of 100 on whether under-performing staff are reassigned or dismissed — the weakest of its eight components, and well under the regional 27.6. A supervisor who cannot see a route cannot act on one, and that score is what the inability looks like added up.

RWANDA RECOUNTS ITS SHOPS EVERY THREE YEARS

Rwanda offers a plain contrast, and an administrative rather than a technological one. The National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda has run an establishment census in 2011, 2014, 2017, 2020 and 2023, publishing the results down to district level. The 2023 round counted 269,326 establishments, 53.5 per cent in wholesale and retail trade and 92.2 per cent micro-enterprises of fewer than four workers, and it caught the map moving: against 2020, urban establishments were up 44.6 per cent and rural ones down 3.4 per cent. A company planning coverage in Rwanda can refresh its outlet universe against a public count never more than three years old, and read which way the shops are travelling. Its Ugandan counterpart has nothing of the kind to consult.

None of this argues for a larger head office. What would change that Friday afternoon is narrower: a visit recorded where it happens rather than remembered afterwards, an outlet identified once and kept, an order and its payment captured as one event rather than reconciled later out of two books, and shelf stock counted by the person standing in front of it. Systems of that shape are increasingly built locally, to run on the representative's own handset, hold what they captured when the network drops, and settle against mobile money. The constraint is real: GSMA Intelligence, in its 2024 report on the region's mobile economy, put mobile internet penetration across Sub-Saharan Africa at 27 per cent at the end of 2023, with a usage gap of 60 per cent among those a network already covers. The shop at the far end will not be the digital node, and the agent standing in it has to be.

WHAT IS THE WAY FORWARD?

Several things would move this. The Uganda Bureau of Statistics should shorten the interval between business censuses and publish the register at a resolution distributors can work from: a nine-year-old picture of 388,179 trade businesses is a historical document, not a map. The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives, which has owned the micro, small and medium enterprise policy since 2015, should treat the retail counter as infrastructure worth enumerating. Manufacturers and distributors should stop buying supervision as headcount and buy it as evidence, judging a territory on outlets actually served and not on volume shipped into it. Providers building for the market should design for an intermittent network, a modest handset and a representative paid by the day. Trade associations should commission the retail audit nobody has, since a country unable to say how many shops it holds cannot say how many it fails to reach.

The supervisor will sit down to the same reconciliation next Friday, and the Friday after that. What he lacks is not diligence, and not eleven more honest representatives. It is the plain record of a week that had already happened, in front of eleven people, and that nobody arranged to capture while it did.