Kiira Motors Corporation new vehicle plant in Jinja is due for commissioning on Monday, further strengthening the growth of the electric mobility industry in Uganda. The Kiira Vehicle Plant has 65,000 square metres of production spaces has the capacity to produce electric and hybrid buses, trucks and luxury cars, having produced and launched Africa’s first Electric car, the Kiira EV, in October 2011. By then it was still wholly under Makerere University.
The Initial Installed Capacity of the Kiira Vehicle Plant is 2,500 buses per year, with plans to further upgrade it to 5,000 units annually in the medium term. According to the documents at the mother ministry, Ministry of Science, Innovation and Technology (STI), the plant is expected to provide 14,000 jobs directly and indirectly. This year, the government, which holds 96 percent of the company through the Ministry alongside Makerere’s 4% of STI in the Office of the President, provided 32.
5 billion shillings to enhance its capacity. This allocation is part of the 2024/25 financial year budget totaling 257 billion shillings for the STI sector, the other going into other projects like the Banana Industrial Research and Development Centre (PIBID) which has been allocated 49.6 billion.
Government has embarked on the journey of building a USD500 billion economy within 15 years under its tenfold growth strategy. In this journey, technology-led productivity is a necessary condition to reach the double-digit economic growth pot.