STELLA OKETCHO | COMMENT | Consultrans’s relationship with Uganda’s railway sector did not begin with a single contract – it began with groundwork. As early as 2019, Consultrans authored the Kampala–Malaba Feasibility Study, which went on to underpin the wider East African Community Railway Rehabilitation Support Project, financed in part by the African Development Bank and African Development Fund.
That early involvement positioned the firm for the broader Uganda Railways Corporation rehabilitation programme, targeting the 215 km Malaba–Kampala metre-gauge line and associated network (roughly 282 km including the Kampala–Port Bell and Kampala– Nalukolongo–Kyengera branches). Consultrans was formally awarded its Uganda contract by URC on 29 June 2020 (contract URC/CONS/2019-20/00426) and after contract signature and a preparatory phase, operations formally began on 1 February 2022.
The mandate covered three flagship components:
1. Detailed engineering design for refurbishment of the Kampala–Namanve and Tororo–Malaba sections of the line — Uganda’s main link to the Kenyan border and the port of Mombasa.
2. Preliminary design of the Kampala Multimodal Hub, intended to integrate rail with road, urban transport and logistics in the capital.
3. A three-year Capacity Building Project (CBP) for URC staff and the establishment of a project management office, aimed at strengthening the institution’s own ability to plan, execute and eventually operate the rehabilitated network —
4. A feasibility study for a modern national signalling and traffic-control system, to end URC’s dependence on Kenya-based train control.
This is precisely the combination Consultrans is built for: feasibility work, detailed engineering design and institutional capacity building delivered by one organization with continuity across all three. Having authored the original feasibility study, the firm carried institutional memory of the corridor’s technical and economic constraints straight into the detailed design phase — reducing the relearning that often slows down large rail programmes when consultants change between study phases. It also fits the firm’s demonstrated pattern for providing their clients with bilateral development funding as well as using multilateral financing.
In Uganda , the financing was backed by the government of Spain through the Official Spanish Funding- Corporate Internationalisation Fund (FIEM) under very favourably terms to deliver infrastructure programmes in markets where local technical capacity is still being built up alongside the physical works.
So Who is Consultrans?
When Uganda Railways Corporation (URC) went looking for a partner to help pull its meter- gauge network back from decades of neglect, it needed more than a contractor. It needed a firm that had done this before — that had rebuilt railways from the ground up, trained institutions to run them and delivered on schedules and budgets in some of the most demanding environments in the world. That firm is Consultrans SAU.
Consultrans is a Spanish engineering and consultancy firm founded in 1985, built from the outset around a single conviction: that transport infrastructure projects succeed when engineers, economists, lawyers and IT specialists work as one integrated team rather than in silos. That philosophy has shaped the company for close to forty years, growing it from a small transport-focused consultancy into an international engineering house with a clear specialization in railways — from high-speed lines to metre-gauge freight corridors, metros, trams and intermodal logistics hubs.