The resource case
North-eastern Uganda hosts gold occurrences alongside marble, limestone and a range of industrial minerals, with a long history of artisanal working. Regional mapping supports continued prospectivity, and several exploration licences cover ground there.
The consent case
Karamoja is largely pastoralist, with communal land holdings that do not map neatly onto licence boundaries drawn in Kampala. Projects that treated consultation as a formality have generated durable opposition, and in several documented cases lost access entirely.
Free, prior and informed consent is not a compliance box in this district. It is the operating licence, and it has to be renewed continuously.
What good practice looks like
Benefit agreements negotiated with recognised community structures, water infrastructure delivered before extraction rather than after, and grievance mechanisms that produce visible outcomes. Companies applying that sequence have kept access. Companies that inverted it have not.