Kampala City Festival Returns: More Than Just a Street Party
After a seven-year pause, the Kampala City Festival is back — this time with deeper purpose: celebrating urban growth, diversity, and sustainability.
In October 12.2025, Kampala will once again pulse with the beats, colours, and energy of its biggest urban celebration: the Kampala City Festival. Suspended since 2018, the festival is returning not just as a carnival or street party but as a platform that reflects the city’s recent strides in infrastructure, green spaces, public services, and innovation.
What’s Changed: Festival as Statement
Rebrand & Purpose: Under KCCA’s leadership (Sharifah Buzeki), the festival is reimagined. It’s about more than entertainment; it’s about showing the city’s transformation: cleaner streets, improved markets, better drainage, environmental planning.
Inclusion & Innovation: The programme is expected to include creative arts, local innovation, sustainability projects (urban gardening, tree planting, anti-litter campaigns), medical camps, possibly tech or youth innovation showcases.
Civic Pride & Unity: The festival is promoted as non-partisan; a moment to bring different parts of the city together, beyond politics, to renew commitment to a cleaner, inclusive, and more livable Kampala.
Impact & Stakes
Economic & Social Opportunity: Local artists, vendors, food entrepreneurs, creatives stand to benefit from renewed tourism, local spending, exposure.
Urban Renewal Visibility: The festival gives visibility to infrastructure improvements, such as improved markets, drainage works, improvements in waste management. This helps hold authorities accountable and build public support.
Challenges & Risks: Coordinating large public events always carries risks: funding, logistical capacity, crowd control, ensuring that less affluent communities are included (not just central, already well-served areas). Also, balancing the festival’s celebratory side with its developmental goals.
The returning Kampala City Festival represents more than nostalgia—it’s an inflection point. Kampala is stepping into a new urban era where culture, environment, public services and civic agency are foregrounded. If it succeeds, it may reset what urban celebration in city Africa looks like: not just spectacle, but substance.
