On a crisp evening at Publiek Authentiek, one of Ghent’s most characterful venues, a delegation from Uganda did something unusual for a country its size: it commanded the room.
Representatives of the Uganda Tourism Board (UTB), Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a clutch of Uganda’s most enterprising private-sector tour operators gathered before an audience of Belgian travel professionals, buyers, and potential partners and made the case, course by course and slide by slide, that the Pearl of Africa deserves a prominent spot-on Europe’s travel map.
The Ghent event was the centrepiece of a broader series of tourism roadshows sweeping through Brussels and the wider BENELUX region, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg under the umbrella of Uganda’s Economic and Commercial Diplomacy (ECD) agenda.
Far from a routine promotional exercise, the roadshows represent a deliberate, strategically calibrated effort to crack open one of Europe’s most lucrative and discerning outbound travel markets.
What sets these roadshows apart from conventional tourism junkets is their architecture. Uganda’s EU Mission has embedded the promotional push squarely within the country’s foreign policy framework, treating tourism not merely as a sector to be marketed, but as an instrument of economic statecraft.
The delegation’s prior stop in Luxembourg, where UTB, UWA, and private operators met with counterparts from across the Grand Duchy, exemplified this philosophy in action.
“Tourism remains central to Uganda’s ECD-driven economic transformation agenda,” said Juliana Kagwa, Chief Executive Officer of the Uganda Tourism Board, whose presentation at the Ghent event drew particular attention.
Kagwa’s pitch was equal parts poetry and pragmatism: she conjured the spectacle of mountain gorillas in Bwindi’s mist-shrouded forests, the thunderous cascade of Murchison Falls, and the migratory wildebeest spectacles of the Queen Elizabeth plains while simultaneously speaking the language of return on investment, market access, and supply chain integration that European buyers needed to hear.
One of the evening’s most practically valuable segments came courtesy of the THX Agency, a regional travel-market intelligence firm, whose presentation dissected the behavioural and cultural particularities of Belgian and Luxembourg travellers. The findings were illuminating. Belgian buyers, it emerged, are characterised by deep brand loyalty. Once they trust a destination or operator, they return, and they refer. They are also drawn, with increasing intensity, to what the industry terms “experiential” or “immersive” travel: journeys that prioritise authentic encounters over curated spectacle.
This is, for Uganda, extraordinarily good news. The country’s competitive tourism proposition, Gorilla trekking in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (home to roughly half the world’s remaining mountain gorillas), chimpanzee habituation in Kibale Forest, white-water rafting on the source of the Nile and birding across 1,000-plus species, is almost tailor-made for the adventurous, nature-conscious European traveller the BENELUX market disproportionately produces.
The Netherlands and Belgium consistently rank among the top European nations for outbound travel per capita, and both markets have shown a growing appetite for sustainable, conservation-linked tourism experiences. Uganda’s narrative that visiting the country directly funds wildlife protection and community livelihoods aligns with the ethical travel values increasingly shaping European consumer choices.
The Ghent event was not purely transactional. Ugandan tour operators held personalised one-on-one meetings with Belgian buyers throughout the evening, laying the groundwork for potential partnerships that could feed visitors into Uganda’s lodges, national parks, cultural sites, and Nile-adjacent adventure corridors.
These face-to-face exchanges, difficult to replicate in a digital pitch deck, are precisely the kind of relationship-building that converts a destination from “interesting option” to “confirmed booking.”
The evening closed on a note that perhaps did more for Uganda’s brand than any presentation: a generous spread of Ugandan cuisine, prepared and presented by the Embassy of the Republic of Uganda in Brussels. Matoke, groundnut stew, rolex wraps, and other culinary staples offered guests a sensory passport to East Africa, a reminder that culture, in tourism, is both the product and the pitch.
Uganda’s investment in these roadshows reflects a hard-nosed calculation about where growth must come from. Tourism has historically been one of Uganda’s top foreign exchange earners, and the sector is being counted upon to generate employment across regions, support women- and youth-led enterprises in hospitality and guiding, and fund the conservation infrastructure that keeps Uganda’s wildlife its single most marketable asset alive and accessible.
For policymakers, the BENELUX roadshows are therefore not simply a marketing campaign; they are structured market development interventions, designed to expand Uganda’s European footprint at precisely the moment when global demand for sustainable, wildlife-based travel is surging.
Post-pandemic recovery patterns have reinforced a shift toward longer, more meaningful trips to less-visited destinations, a trend that plays directly to Uganda’s strengths.
As the delegation prepares to wrap up its BENELUX circuit and consolidate the connections forged across Luxembourg, Ghent, and Brussels, one message from Juliana Kagwa’s presentation lingered in the room at Publiek Authentiek: Uganda is open, ready, and critically already waiting to exceed expectations. For an industry built on the promise of discovery, that may be the most compelling pitch of all.
