Getting Money out of Uganda

My guess is that this situation is not an accident. Corrupt officials in many African countries make a lot of money off of their citizens by denying them access to international commerce unless they go through the right intermediary (usually a relative of the corrupt official). Hence the 35% markup the author mentions -- if there was anything resembling a free market, the markup would be lower. This markup effectively functions as a tariff targeting multinational companies: you can bring money into the country easily, but if you want to remove it, you have to pay. And the money likely goes right back into the hands of the bureaucrats and their relatives.

There are many places in this world where laws are used simply as tools to maintain the wealth of the ruling class. If you come up with a business that tries to disrupt their order, they will simply invent some tax evasion charges and seize your assets. You'll probably lose because the judge is also a distant relative who is in on the entire scheme.

To be honest I was thinking this was the punch line to something that started

"Dearest Person; I run a very successful website in <far away place> and have accumulated <very large number> of dollars which I cannot get out of the country without your help ..."

However, since that wasn't the case, is it simply that countries without a developed banking system have issues? I would expect the normal path here would be to establish an account with a bank in the country, build enough local infrastructure to allow for transactions to and from that bank, and also for wiring money from that bank to other banks that are closer to you.

You get a business or corporate account with Ecobank and then collect payments with it. They even do teller implant services so you can open a storefront in Kampala and they will staff it with somebody who can collect payments in person to deposit to your Africa wide account which you later can then SWIFT wire transfer anywhere you want.

Another method is simply become your own XpressMoney or RIA agent (avoid WU), and then instead of having to physically go check for funds you can load up your agent account and immediately see the funds are there.

There are plenty of large European payment gateways that have local African payment methods like cash bank deposits you can use but some of them take a month to settle payments.

You could also roll your own voucher type system. Various traders in Uganda buy vouchers from you then resell them p2p so the money never leaves your bank account while changing hands all over Africa. The customer enters a PIN to split the voucher or deposit it to their betting account. This requires a competent crypto engineer obviously. Could even use your own centrally mined alt-cryptocurrency. Or you could partner with storefont money changers with a lot of branches in Uganda to accept money on your behalf (like selling PIN codes) that way they already have all the local licenses and satisfy ID requirements for payments in/out and your company only handles business to business payments eliminating all kinds of problems with regulators.

Edit: there's also World Bank publications you can read to discover easier money transfer corridors like Masterlink which is a Uganda->UK service http://www.amazon.com/dp/0821384309 or USAID publications http://solutionscenter.nethope.org/assets/collaterals/Uganda...

You can also ask your embassy in Uganda for a financial report telling them you need information on the local banking and money transfer systems. I did this for Kenya and received a very detailed pdf with exact fees of each service, bank recommendations for trading ect.

Bitcoin might be the answer

I recently had lunch with a guy that set up telecom networks in ex-soviet bloc countries in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

He worked with American / Euro companies and interfaced with the hard-scrabble governments that were in the power tug-of-war at the time.

One of the most complicated tasks he ran into was moving money in-and-out of the countries, largely due to currency de-stabilization.

His solution was to buy hundreds-of-tons of grapes in the local currency, and then transport the grapes to Greece where they could be exchanged for international currency.

This was in the early 1990s, fairly recent history, but it still baffles me that these sort of problems still exist at the scale that they do.

Hawala حوالة could be an option, if you know wealthy Jewish or Muslim in your country. They certainly do business, and know how to transfer money.