The controversial Bujagali dam project began in 1999 when the Ugandan government commissioned AES Nile Power to construct and operate the Bujagali hydropower plant on the Victoria Nile river. The company withdrew before construction began and a new consortium - Sithe Global Power LLC, from the United States, and Industrial Promotion Services, a division of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) - were appointed to construct the dam. Construction began 2007 and the dam began delivering electricity in 2012 with a reported capacity of 250 megawatts[1]. Loans came from the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and the African Development Bank. Italian construction company Salini was selected to be lead contractor. Civil society organizations locally and internationally rallied against the project. Chief complaints were that resettlement and compensation of affected communities was inadequate and that people were worse-off than they originally were [2,4]. Related complaints included a lack of consultation and loss of livelihoods. They asserted that economic analysis of the dam and the cost to the Ugandan public was inadequate, supporting other analyses linking the project to a global privatisation trend and involvement of private companies in electricity provision[3], a World Bank pushed reform agenda.

The affected people which need to be resettled are 13,760.

The claimed capacity of the dam is 250 MW, but civil society organization the National Association of Professional Environmentalists (NAPE) has claimed that only 121MW can be generated, based on river run-offs. NAPE reports that electricity tariffs have continued to hike from six US cents to the current 24 US cents. A government subsidy reduces this to 17 US cents, a figure NAPE says is still unaffordable to most Ugandans.