Uganda's premier national forum, where the people who set policy and the people who live with it finally sit at the same table. Organised and convened by ELSF.
For years, Ugandan exporters carried the weight of a logistics system that wasn't built around them. Unpredictable transport costs. Financing that wasn't available. Cold-chain infrastructure that existed on paper but not in practice. Trade agreements that opened doors but gave businesses no help walking through them.
The frustration was - and remains - real. But the conversations about fixing it were happening in separate rooms.
NELD was created to change that: to give Uganda's logistics challenges one national home where all the institutions capable of driving change could hear the people experiencing those challenges firsthand, and be held accountable to responding.
Each edition of NELD built on the last, sharpening the national understanding of Uganda's logistics landscape and raising the ambition of the solutions we pursue together.
The very first National Export Logistics Dialogue asked a question Uganda's export sector had circled for years: why, in a country with such extraordinary agricultural output and growing regional trade agreements, do so few businesses export — and those that do, why at such enormous cost?
By 2023 the conversation was ready to go deeper — to the question at the heart of most logistics failures: money. Who finances Uganda's export logistics, what structures exist, and what would unlock a new flow of capital into the sector?
By 2024, NELD had matured into Uganda's most consequential annual logistics forum — returning to food trade logistics, but now with two years of dialogue, standing commitments and a live execution programme behind it.
MoWT, MoFPED, MTIC, Free Zones Authority, trade authorities and standards institutions.
Businesses at every scale - from smallholder farmers and food processors to large commodity exporters and manufacturers.
Freight forwarders, cargo clearers, transport operators, consolidators, warehouse managers and cold-chain providers.
Institutions explaining export financing structures, risk frameworks and opportunities for MSMEs.
USAID, UNDP and other organisations bringing technical insight, funding and regional perspective.
One table. One honest agenda.