There is a particular kind of silence that every small importer in Kampala knows by heart. It begins the moment their goods leave a factory floor in Guangzhou or a warehouse in Dubai, and it does not lift until, weeks later, a phone call comes through from a clearing agent with a number attached — this is what you owe, this is when it lands, this is what’s left after everything is paid. In between, there is nothing. No tracking, no running total, no way of knowing whether the shipment is sitting in Mombasa, moving up to the next port, or already parked at a warehouse in Kampala waiting on paperwork nobody has told you about.
That gap is now closing, and it is closing under a strong partnership signed on 29th May 2026 between TradeMark Africa, the Uganda Cargo Consolidators Association and CINAT Group Limited — through its technology and systems subsidiary, CINAT Technologies — to develop and roll out a digital trade facilitation platform for SME importers and exporters across the country. At the center of it is a system called BeezyLCL, built originally out of a joint concept between the Uganda Cargo Consolidators Association, the Uganda Groupage Importers and Exporters Association, the Uganda Revenue Authority and TradeMark East Africa, and now being carried into full implementation with CINAT Technologies leading development, onboarding, and market rollout.
For Uganda’s small and medium traders, that silence has never just been an inconvenience. It has been the cost of doing business, paid quietly, shipment after shipment, for years.
It is a cost that falls hardest on exactly the businesses Uganda can least afford to leave behind. Small and medium enterprises make up the overwhelming majority of registered businesses in the country and are consistently cited as the backbone of employment outside agriculture, yet they are also the businesses with the least leverage in a supply chain built, historically, around the full container load.
A large importer bringing in a forty-foot container has always had visibility, because they own the whole box. A small trader bringing in three cartons of shoes or half a pallet of phone accessories has had to share that container with strangers, pool costs with strangers, and trust that everyone’s interests — some chasing tax compliance, some chasing exemptions, some simply chasing speed — would somehow sort themselves out by the time the goods reached home. This shared-container arrangement, known in the trade as groupage or Less than Container Load (LCL) shipping, has quietly underpinned a huge share of Uganda’s import economy, and it has done so with almost no shared system to make it transparent, fair, or fast.
What BeezyLCL sets out to do is deceptively simple: give a small trader the same real-time visibility into their cargo that has, until now, only ever belonged to companies large enough to own an entire container outright. A trader logs their shipment straight from their phone at the point of origin — what the goods are, their customs classification, quantity, weight, a photograph of each item — and the system generates a QR-coded manifest on the spot. From there, the trader chooses their own consolidator, insurer, warehouse operator, clearing agent, and transporter from a registered network, and every one of those providers is notified automatically and asked to bill transparently. As the shipment moves, the system tracks it, merging individual manifests into one container-level bill when cargo is consolidated, then automatically splitting it back into each importer’s individual account the moment it’s deconsolidated at the destination warehouse.
That is the scale of the problem TradeMark Africa and UCCA are putting their names behind, and it is the scale of the opportunity CINAT Group has just stepped into. TradeMark Africa has spent years working to reduce the time and cost of moving goods across East African borders, and its backing of BeezyLCL signals something specific: that digital trade facilitation for small traders — not just large exporters — is now seen as core to unlocking regional trade rather than a side project.
For years, the container has moved and said nothing, and Uganda’s small traders have simply waited to be told what happened to their goods after the fact.
BeezyLCL is betting that Uganda’s traders would rather know.