In September 2024, the CASCADE team held its first City Learning Lab in Kampala, a day of mapping, listening, and beginning to make sense of the climate-health risks shaping life in Uganda’s capital.

The CASCADE project, Cascading Climate and Health Risks in African Cities, works across five cities (Kampala, Harare, Accra, Johannesburg, and Cape Town). Launched in 2023, it brings together researchers, city actors, and communities to better understand climate-health risks in African cities and co-produce locally grounded, practical responses.

Held at the Imperial Botanical Beach Hotel in Entebbe, the Lab gathered a diverse mix of participants, from Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) officials and ministry representatives to NGOs, community leaders from informal settlements, researchers, and CASCADE Fellows.

Beginning with the Issues

Dr. Stephen Okoboi, CASCADE Co-Principal Investigator and host in Kampala, opened the Lab and the day moved quickly into participant-led work. Five themes rose to the top. Air pollution, food insecurity, water management and flooding, displacement, and disease, all underscored by the cross-cutting realities of poverty and politics.

Mess Mapping a Complex City

The core of the Lab was a “mess mapping” exercise, a method designed for tangled challenges that don’t sit neatly in any single sector. Working in groups, participants explored what drives each problem, who is affected, and who is already responding. The maps that emerged were dense with arrows, illustrating how air pollution, urban sprawl, food import dependency, healthcare staffing, and informal settlement governance are bound together.

The exercise made clear that none of these challenges can be addressed in isolation, and that the people affected and the people responsible often overlap.

Voices from the City

A panel session brought together community leaders, NGO representatives, and KCCA officials. Ms. Zam Byakiika of the National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda opened with a saying she said captures life in Bwaise III, “Water is life when you do not stay in Bwaise.” She described flooding that contaminates water sources, cholera that spreads where there are too few toilets, malaria in crowded homes without space for mosquito nets, and the heightened vulnerability of women and girls during floods.

Other panellists shared how their organisations are responding from the ground up, through community profiling, savings groups, urban farming, and waste management, and how KCCA is working across departments to deliver climate-aware services.

Priorities Going Forward

By the end of the day, participants had identified priority areas to take forward and agreed to form a working group. CASCADE Fellows are now working closely with KCCA and local partners to ground their research in the realities the Lab surfaced.

These priorities now help guide CASCADE’s research in Kampala and shape the focus of future engagements.

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CASCADE is one of 14 consortia under the DELTAS Africa II initiative (2023–2026), implemented by the Science for Africa Foundation with support from Wellcome and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

Author: Alacia Armstrong, Communications Lead, CASCADE.