Green Freedom: Youth, Work, and Resilience in Kampala's Informal Settlements
There is a promise most of us grew up with: that effort leads to opportunity. That if you study, if you show up, if you try — something will open.
In Uganda, that promise collides with arithmetic. Every year, 700,000 young people finish their education and enter the job market. The economy creates roughly 75,000 new positions.[1] Out of every nine graduates, one finds formal work. The other eight figure it out on their own — or don't.
Abdallah, a university student in Kampala, figured it out in soil. He started growing things in the narrow margins of his neighbourhood — vegetables, herbs, whatever the ground would hold. A small urban plot, enough to feed himself and enough to bring to market. Over time, his patch of green also inspired others. What looked like one young man's side project turned out to be a signal of something much broader: across Kampala's informal settlements, young people are building livelihoods from the ground up, in the most literal sense.
The film Green Freedom follows Abdallah's journey. But the forces surrounding his story — the employment crisis, the rapid urbanisation, the climate pressures — raise a question the film alone cannot answer: what happens when a generation starts building an economy the formal system failed to provide?
A generation without a landing strip
Uganda has the second youngest population on earth, after Niger.[2] Of the country's 45.9 million people, 10.7 million are aged 18–30. The population is projected to reach 85 million by 2050.[3]
The job market is not expanding to meet them. Uganda's Employment and Skills Status Report 2025 documents the trajectory: national unemployment climbed from 8.8% in 2019 to 12.3% in 2024. Youth unemployment — those actively seeking work — reached 16.1%. But that figure only counts people still looking. The wider picture: 50.9% of Ugandans aged 18–30 are not in employment, education, or training — more than half of the country's young adults, disconnected from the formal economy entirely.[4]
The ILO's Decent Work Country Programme for Uganda notes that 83% of youth have no skills or specialisation, and only 1.4% hold trade or technical qualifications.[1] The education system and the economy operate in parallel universes. An Afrobarometer survey confirmed what anyone on the ground already knows: 39% of young Ugandans name unemployment as the country's most pressing problem — ranking it above health, education, and governance.[5]
Cities that grow faster than plans
Kampala is urbanising at 4.5% per year — among the fastest rates on the continent. The city adds roughly 300,000 residents annually, many of them arriving from rural areas in search of the work that rural agriculture no longer provides.[6]
Most do not land in planned neighbourhoods. Kampala has over 57 informal settlements, home to more than half a million people.[6] More than 60% of the city's residents live in them.[7] In Bwaise, one of the most densely packed areas, 82% of residents survive on less than $2 a day.[8] Only 36% of people in informal settlements have access to a safe electricity connection.[6]
These are not peripheral pockets of the city. They are the city — dense, resourceful, under-served, and largely invisible to formal planning processes. The ILO estimates that informal employment accounts for 88.3% of jobs in urban Africa.[9] In Kampala's settlements, work is something you piece together: market stalls, construction, phone-based services, community trade. For young people, creating a livelihood means inventing one.
The climate dimension
Kampala's informal settlements occupy the city's lowest and most exposed land — wetlands, drainage corridors, flood plains. The Kampala Capital City Authority's 2025 Climate Change and Vulnerability Assessment documents what residents already experience: rising temperatures, heavier and more erratic rainfall, and extreme weather events growing in frequency across all five administrative divisions.[10]
Between 2019 and 2020, the city was hit by some of its worst flooding in recent memory — despite a Drainage Master Plan that had been in place since 2015.[11] Millions of Ugandans face displacement from flooding each year, and it is the informal settlements that absorb the heaviest damage.[10] Poor drainage amplifies every downpour. Lack of vegetation intensifies heat. Structures built from salvaged materials buckle under pressure.
The communities with the least infrastructure carry the greatest exposure. Climate change does not arrive equally.
Green spaces as economic ground
Abdallah's garden exists inside this reality. So do hundreds of others.
Ghetto Go Green, a programme run by Dreamtown and the Network for Active Citizens (NAC) in Kampala, has established green spaces across the city's informal settlements. Some are planted on house walls. Others fill empty corners between buildings. The larger ones anchor entire community areas in the K-zones — the informal settlement clusters that ring the city centre.
These are not ornamental projects. Each space carries multiple functions: growing food for consumption and sale, absorbing rainwater to reduce flooding, cooling streets in heat-stressed areas, and providing a physical gathering point where young people can meet, train, organise, and plan their next steps.
The model is deliberately bottom-up. Dreamtown does not design the spaces and hand them to communities. Ideas come from youth groups, who identify needs locally and co-develop spaces with the people who will use and maintain them. The organisation's role is connector — linking young people with funding, technical support, and each other — while leaving ownership where it starts.
The results have multiplied. The Kamwokya urban farm has trained 800 young people. Community-run gardens and demonstration plots have spread across Kampala's K-zones — in Bwaise, Kinawataka, Kunya, Kyebando — each one started by someone who trained at another.
Abdallah is one person inside this pattern. Young people building something real from what they can reach — soil, shared knowledge, the willingness to start small.
A parallel from Copenhagen
On the other side of the world, a different version of the same tension plays out. In Copenhagen, Simon founded Buddha Bikes in 2015 — a socio-economic enterprise that rescues discarded bicycles from recycling centres, refurbishes them, and sells them on. Under Danish law, the business model prohibits owners from extracting profit. Revenue goes back into the mission, which includes apprenticeships for people who had been shut out of traditional employment.
Simon's stated aim is disarmingly direct: he wants people to stop buying new bikes. The goal is behaviour change, not sales growth.
The contexts could not be more different — Copenhagen and Kampala operate at opposite ends of the global resource spectrum. But the underlying logic rhymes. Both start with frustration at a system that wastes human and material potential — and both respond by building something locally rooted, values-driven, designed to spread. They redefine what "decent work" looks like when the dominant economy fails to provide it.
Sustainable Development Goal 8 — decent work and economic growth — often circulates at the level of policy targets and GDP projections. In Kampala's K-zones and Copenhagen's bike workshop, the same goal takes a different shape: people deciding for themselves what productive, meaningful work looks like, and building it from available resources.
The question underneath
Uganda's working-age population will keep growing for decades. Across the continent, the workforce is projected to nearly double by 2050.[12] Whether that becomes a source of collective energy or collective pressure depends largely on what happens in the communities where young people are already improvising their futures.
The green spaces in Kampala's informal settlements are modest in scale. A garden on a wall. A training plot at a primary school compound. A strip of land pulled back from floodwater.
What they carry is less modest. Evidence that young people, given space and basic training, will create economic activity the formal system never anticipated. A working model of climate adaptation that grows from lived experience rather than imported plans. And a question the film Green Freedom leaves with its audience: when the economy you were promised does not arrive, what do you grow in its place?
Green Freedom is part of Dreamtown's Metropolis project — a series of films and stories exploring youth, urbanisation, and resilience across Sub-Saharan Africa. Learn more at dreamtown.ngo/metropolis.
Bibliography
ILO, Decent Work Country Programme for Uganda 2025–2030, 2025. Link
UN-Habitat, Uganda Country Brief, 2023. Link
NTV Uganda, "Uganda's population projected to rise to 85 million by 2050," 2026. Link
National Planning Authority of Uganda, Employment and Skills Status Report 2025. Link
Africa Freedom of Information Centre, "Beyond the Statistic: Ugandan Youth Demand Real Opportunities," 2025. Link
UC Berkeley RAEL, "Evolving service delivery in Uganda's informal settlements," 2024. Link
IntechOpen, "Understanding the Evolving Nature of Urban Flood Risks: The Case of Kampala," 2024. Link
Cities Alliance, "Tackling Climate Change in Kampala's Informal Settlements." Link
AU-ILO, Youth Employment Strategy for Africa (YES-Africa), 2024. Link
KCCA, Climate Change and Vulnerability Assessment Framework Report, 2025. Link
Turyahabwe et al., "Reconciling multiple forms of flood risk knowledge: Insights from Kampala," Science of The Total Environment, 2023. Link
UN Africa Renewal, "Unlocking the potential of Africa's youth." Link
