Over the past four decades, a generation of entrepreneurs, professionals, farmers, and property owners has built significant wealth. As this generation retires or passes on, the challenge facing families is no longer accumulation, but continuity. Yet Uganda’s framework for trusts remains institutionally anchored in a system designed for land administration rather than economic governance.
That mismatch is no longer theoretical. It is now economically costly.
Trusts have outgrown land-centred regulation
Historically, trusts in Uganda were closely associated with land—family holdings, Mailo interests, and protection of property for widows and minors. Although trusts are incorporated under the Trustees Incorporation Act, their supervision and enforcement have long remained embedded within a land-focused ministry. This reflected the nature of wealth at the time.
Today, trusts increasingly hold company shares, operating businesses, rental enterprises, farms and agro-processing ventures, intellectual property, and cross-border assets held by diaspora families. In substance, modern trusts are no longer custodial land vehicles. They are economic governance structures.
This distinction matters. Governance structures require registries capable of tracking control, enforcing fiduciary accountability, supporting continuity of legal personality, and interfacing with company law, financial regulation, and insolvency. Land administration systems are not designed for these functions.
When structure fails, value is destroyed
The collapse of family enterprises following the death or incapacity of founders is a familiar pattern in Uganda. Bank accounts are frozen, decision-making stalls, disputes erupt, creditors panic, and commercial value steadily erodes—often before probate and administration processes can deliver any meaningful resolution.
This is not a failure of entrepreneurship or family values. It is a failure of legal structure.
Where trusts are properly deployed—holding shares, separating ownership from control, and enabling professional management—businesses are far more likely to survive leadership transitions. The difference lies in governance, not goodwill.
Why registration at URSB is not optional—but necessary
The case for registering trusts with the Uganda Registration Services Bureau is not about convenience or institutional expansion. It is about legal coherence, regulatory effectiveness, and economic risk containment.
First, trusts perform governance functions that are functionally equivalent to those of companies and partnerships. They separate ownership from control, impose fiduciary duties, regulate succession, and manage risk. URSB already regulates these governance entities. Placing trusts alongside them recognises their true economic character.
Second, Uganda has already acknowledged—through the 2022 amendments and the 2023 regulations—that trusts pose beneficial ownership and transparency risks. Trustees are now required to maintain registers of beneficial owners. However, enforcement of these obligations is structurally weakened when trust oversight sits outside the very registry that already enforces beneficial ownership for companies and partnerships.
URSB is the only institution with existing beneficial ownership infrastructure, verification systems, and experience in compliance oversight. Without institutional consolidation, beneficial ownership rules for trusts risk becoming formal obligations without effective enforcement.
Third, economic continuity depends on registry interoperability. Modern trusts frequently hold shares in URSB-registered companies and act as shareholders in family enterprises. When trusts are regulated outside the corporate registry ecosystem, fragmentation occurs. Banks hesitate, transactions stall, and succession processes slow down at precisely the moment when speed and certainty are most needed.
Registering trusts at URSB would allow seamless linkage between trust registers and company registers, faster verification for banks and regulators, and reduced transactional friction during succession events. This is not abstract theory; it is the lived experience of families and businesses navigating death, incapacity, or restructuring.
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Fourth, reliance on ministerial discretion—however well intentioned—is not a substitute for a modern, rules-based registry system. Over time, extensive administrative practices have developed to fill gaps in the law. While these practices serve a purpose, governance entities require predictable processes, standardised filings, and accessible records. URSB already operates such systems at scale.
Comparative experience points in one direction
Other jurisdictions confronted this issue years ago. In the United Kingdom, trusts are subject to central registration and beneficial ownership disclosure regimes focused on transparency and compliance, while land remains registered separately. In Kenya and South Africa, trust oversight emphasises fiduciary accountability and continuity, not land administration. In Mauritius, trusts are integrated into a broader corporate and financial governance ecosystem that supports investment and succession planning.
The common thread is institutional clarity: land registration is kept distinct from trust governance.
Uganda is increasingly an outlier in retaining a land-centred institutional model for what has become a core economic governance tool.
A practical reform pathway
This reform need not be disruptive.
Parliament can enact a targeted statutory amendment designating URSB as the principal registry for trusts, while preserving land registration under existing land laws. URSB can establish a governance-focused Trusts Register capturing trustees, trust purposes, and beneficial ownership, without duplicating land records. Existing trusts can migrate over a defined transition period without invalidating prior acts or titles.
The role of the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development would remain intact where it properly belongs: in land registration and administration.
An inevitable alignment
Trusts are no longer peripheral instruments for holding land. They are central tools for succession planning, business continuity, and economic stability.
Uganda has already acknowledged this reality through beneficial ownership reforms. The remaining step is institutional alignment.
If Uganda wants enterprises to outlive their founders, capital to remain productive, and families to avoid destructive disputes, trust regulation must sit where governance expertise already resides.
That place is URSB.
Written by RTN Kalikumutima Deo, Kalikumutima & Co. Advocates.
