By John Kennedy Ssebadduka
When the Finish Line Becomes an Economic Starting Point
Before the first runner crosses the starting line of a destination marathon, somebody has already made money. A hotel has sold a room, a restaurant has served a meal, a fuel station has filled a tank, a boda boda rider has carried a passenger, a supermarket has sold supplies, and somewhere further down the value chain, a farmer may have supplied food to a hotel, a tour operator may have secured a booking, an events company may have hired temporary workers and a local entrepreneur may be preparing merchandise for visitors. Then the gun goes off and thousands of runners begin moving through some of Uganda’s most remarkable landscapes, the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains in Kasese, the tourism city of Fort Portal, the volcanic highlands of Kisoro and the rapidly transforming city of Gulu. The distance may be measured in kilometres, but the opportunity should increasingly be measured in money. That raises one of the most important questions emerging from Uganda’s growing sports-tourism economy: how much economic activity can 42 kilometres generate?
For decades, sport and tourism have largely been discussed as separate industries. Sport brings people together to compete, while tourism moves people into destinations to experience landscapes, wildlife, culture, food and communities. Destination marathons collapse that distinction by using sport to create a reason to travel and then using the destination to create a reason to stay. The economics become particularly interesting because a runner arriving from Kampala, Nairobi, Kigali, London, New York or elsewhere does not arrive only as an athlete. For the duration of that trip, the runner becomes a tourist, a hotel guest, a restaurant customer, a transport passenger, a retail shopper and potentially a safari, hiking or cultural-tourism customer. The registration fee is therefore only the first transaction in what can become a much larger chain of expenditure, and once we follow the runner beyond the starting line and finish line, we begin to see an entire economy.
Around every visiting runner is an ecosystem of businesses capable of capturing part of that expenditure. Hotels and lodges provide accommodation, restaurants provide meals, transport companies and boda boda riders move visitors, tour operators package experiences, guides sell their knowledge of destinations, farmers and food suppliers feed the hospitality industry, retailers provide everyday necessities, event companies supply tents, sound, branding and logistics, while photographers, videographers and content creators document the experience. Even informal traders can benefit from increased footfall. This is where a destination marathon begins creating a local spending multiplier: money brought into a destination by visitors passes through several businesses, suppliers, workers and households. The critical economic question is therefore not simply how much money enters a destination during marathon week, but how many businesses and people that money reaches before it eventually leaves the local economy.
The Tusker Lite Mt. Rwenzori Marathon provides perhaps Uganda’s clearest demonstration of what can happen when a sporting event becomes a destination product. The marathon began in 2022 with just over 800 runners, and by 2025 Uganda’s Ministry of Tourism reported participation of more than 3,500 runners from 56 countries, while organisers reported approximately 6,000 registrations. The distinction between registrations and actual participation is important when interpreting event statistics, but the direction of travel is unmistakable: the event has expanded rapidly and has increasingly brought national, regional and international attention to Kasese. Yet impressive participation figures are only the beginning of the HiPipo Money story, because the more consequential business question is what happens to the money brought into Kasese by those runners, their families, supporters, organisers, sponsors and other visitors.
A Makerere University Tourism Research and Development Centre study around the 2023 marathon estimated that approximately UGX 3.5 billion was injected into the Kasese economy during marathon weekend. That number fundamentally changes how the marathon should be understood because this is no longer simply thousands of people running through Kasese; it is potentially billions of shillings moving through a local economy. The money enters hotels, restaurants, transport businesses, fuel stations, shops, tourism operators and other enterprises, which subsequently pay workers and purchase goods and services from other suppliers. Even more significant is the reported finding that approximately 30 percent of runners were visiting Kasese for the first time because of the marathon. In business language, the marathon is therefore performing an extremely valuable function for the destination: customer acquisition, bringing potential tourism customers into Kasese who might otherwise never have considered travelling there.
Once those visitors have arrived, the Rwenzori Mountains, Queen Elizabeth National Park, the Kazinga Channel, crater lakes, cultural experiences and surrounding communities become additional products capable of being sold to a newly acquired customer. This means the marathon itself does not have to be the final tourism product; it can instead become the entry point into a much larger destination economy. A visitor who initially makes the decision to travel because of a race may subsequently discover wildlife, adventure tourism, food, culture, communities and landscapes that create reasons to stay longer and potentially return. The commercial proposition is therefore remarkably simple: the race gets them there, but the destination must convince them to stay, spend, explore and eventually return.
This is where Uganda’s biggest sports-tourism opportunity may ultimately lie. Imagine two international runners arriving for the same marathon. Runner A arrives on Friday, competes on Saturday and leaves on Sunday, while Runner B arrives on Thursday, competes on Saturday, spends Sunday at Queen Elizabeth National Park, takes a boat cruise on the Kazinga Channel, spends another night in Kasese and begins a Rwenzori experience before leaving several days later. Both people appear as one participant each in the marathon statistics, but economically they are completely different customers because the second visitor purchases more accommodation nights, meals, transportation, tourism activities and potentially local products, creating significantly more transactions throughout the destination economy.
That distinction suggests that the ultimate economic KPI for a destination marathon should not simply be how many people participated. Organisers, tourism authorities, investors and destination managers should increasingly be asking how much each visitor spent, how long they stayed, where they spent their money and how widely that expenditure circulated through the local economy. A destination that attracts 5,000 runners who leave immediately after the race may capture less economic value than another destination attracting fewer runners who stay for four or five nights and purchase multiple tourism experiences. Length of stay, average visitor expenditure and local economic participation should therefore become as important to the business case of destination marathons as registrations and finishing times.
Fort Portal presents another version of the model. The inaugural Fort Portal City Marathon in 2025 attracted approximately 1,000 registered runners alongside 40 exhibitors and more than 100 volunteers, while for 2026 organisers expected more than 2,500 runners and nearly 5,000 participants across the wider three-day programme. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Fort Portal model, however, is the destination itself because the city becomes part of the course. Runners move past cultural landmarks, institutions, markets and communities while the surrounding tourism ecosystem offers crater lakes, tea estates, national parks, cultural attractions and other experiences. Instead of merely advertising Fort Portal to somebody sitting hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, the marathon physically brings that person into the city and makes them experience the destination while participating in the event.
The marathon expo adds another important commercial layer because when local businesses exhibit alongside the sporting event, the marathon begins transforming from a gathering into a marketplace. Businesses gain access to thousands of participants, visitors and residents concentrated in one place, creating opportunities for customer acquisition, product demonstrations, direct sales, brand visibility and partnerships. This distinction matters because a successful destination marathon should not simply fill hotels; it should create customers for local enterprises across the destination. If that customer concentration becomes predictable every year, businesses can begin preparing products, services, staffing, inventory and marketing specifically around marathon week, gradually transforming what begins as temporary event demand into a recurring commercial opportunity.
The Virunga Gorilla Marathon introduces another dimension to the emerging sports-tourism economy. Its routes take participants through the highland landscapes around Kisoro, with the Virunga volcanoes, Lake Mutanda and communities bordering Mgahinga Gorilla National Park forming part of the wider experience. Kisoro’s proposition, however, extends beyond tourism expenditure because the marathon has positioned tourism, economic development, talent identification and climate-change mitigation among its pillars, with the 2025 edition targeting the planting of 10,000 trees alongside support for community initiatives. This creates an important relationship between sport, tourism, environmental sustainability and local economic development, particularly in a destination whose competitive tourism advantage depends heavily on the continued protection of its natural environment.
Kisoro’s forests, mountains, lakes, gorillas and landscapes should therefore not be understood simply as beautiful scenery; they are productive economic assets capable of attracting visitors whose expenditure supports accommodation businesses, restaurants, transporters, guides, farmers, retailers and communities. Conservation helps protect those assets so that they can continue attracting future visitors, while a successful tourism economy can in turn provide communities with greater economic reasons to participate in conservation. The challenge, and opportunity, is designing the system so that tourism expenditure reaches communities sufficiently to give them an economic stake in protecting the environmental assets upon which the destination economy depends. In that sense, a marathon can potentially become not merely a tourism event but part of a wider economic model connecting visitor expenditure, livelihoods, conservation and destination resilience.
Gulu offers perhaps the most fascinating story of destination repositioning. For decades, perceptions of northern Uganda, particularly internationally, were heavily influenced by its history of conflict, but the Gulu City Marathon provides an opportunity to present another story centred on enterprise, culture, resilience, heritage and tourism. Participation grew from more than 800 runners during the inaugural 2024 edition to more than 2,000 in 2025, while organisers estimated that the 2025 event generated approximately UGX 1.5 billion in direct spending within Gulu’s local economy. That expenditure represents hotel rooms, restaurant meals, transport journeys, retail purchases and numerous other transactions that directly translate the arrival of runners and visitors into economic activity for local businesses.
Gulu also adds another layer because part of the event’s proceeds has been directed towards community initiatives, including education and youth skilling. The marathon therefore demonstrates two potential economic channels operating simultaneously: visitors spend money inside the destination economy while the event itself can reinvest part of its revenues into human capital and community development. One channel creates immediate commercial activity for businesses and workers, while the other potentially contributes to longer-term social and economic capacity. That combination makes Gulu particularly important within Uganda’s emerging marathon economy because sport is being used not only to attract expenditure but also to contribute to a broader repositioning of the city and its surrounding region.
Once thousands of visitors begin arriving predictably in the same destination every year, an entrepreneur should see more than runners; they should see demand. Accommodation can be developed, airport and intercity transfers can be packaged, restaurants can develop runner-focused menus, tour operators can create three-day, five-day and seven-day marathon tourism packages, local designers can manufacture merchandise, farmers can enter hospitality supply chains, photographers and videographers can sell race-day content, fintech companies can facilitate event and merchant payments, insurance companies can develop travel and sports products, telecommunications companies can create visitor connectivity packages, banks can finance hospitality and tourism SMEs preparing for peak demand, while mobility platforms can develop race-week transport products. Tourism businesses can additionally package post-race recovery experiences, safaris, hiking, cultural tourism and wellness around the same customer.
Even marathon registration itself could eventually become the beginning of a much larger digital commerce journey in which accommodation, transportation, tourism experiences, merchandise, insurance and other products are sold around a single customer. This is where the 42-kilometre economy becomes particularly compelling from an investment perspective because a predictable annual concentration of customers creates a predictable annual concentration of demand, and predictable demand can justify investment. Once entrepreneurs know that thousands of people will arrive in a particular destination during a defined period every year, they can build businesses and products around that demand instead of treating marathon week as an unexpected spike in commercial activity.
Uganda should therefore begin measuring destination marathons differently. Participation remains important, but the deeper economic scorecard should establish how many runners travelled from outside the destination, how many came internationally, how many nights they stayed, their average visitor expenditure, hotel occupancy during the event period, restaurant expenditure, transport expenditure, attraction bookings, local procurement, jobs supported, SMEs participating, tax revenues generated, community investment and subsequent return visits. Those numbers would transform marathon impact reports into something far more valuable: investment intelligence capable of telling businesses, financial institutions, government agencies and entrepreneurs where opportunities are emerging.
If accommodation repeatedly reaches capacity during marathon periods, investors have a market signal. If transport demand consistently spikes, mobility businesses have a market signal. If international runners routinely extend their trips into safaris or mountain experiences, tour operators have a market signal. If local businesses generate significant revenues during marathon week, lenders and investors have a market signal, and if visitors subsequently return with friends and family, Uganda has evidence that the marathon is doing something even more valuable than generating event tourism: it is acquiring long-term tourism customers. This is why economic measurement should become central to the next phase of Uganda’s destination-marathon development.
The bigger opportunity is therefore not Kasese, Fort Portal, Kisoro or Gulu individually, but what happens when Uganda begins thinking about them collectively. Imagine a deliberately structured Uganda Destination Marathon Circuit connecting several races across the national tourism calendar and marketing Uganda internationally and regionally not simply as a country with individual running events but as a running destination. Marathon registration could be bundled with accommodation, domestic transportation, national parks, cultural experiences, adventure tourism and local commerce, creating packages that encourage visitors to move through multiple parts of the economy before and after their races. An international runner attracted by one marathon could even be converted into a repeat visitor for another destination event elsewhere in Uganda.
Such a model creates potential winners across the economy. Government gains a tourism customer-acquisition channel, sponsors gain audiences, destinations gain visitors, hotels gain occupancy, SMEs gain customers, tour operators gain bookings, farmers and suppliers gain access to hospitality value chains, communities gain economic opportunities and Uganda gains another product through which its landscapes, cities, culture, people and businesses can be presented to the world. The strategic objective should therefore be bigger than producing successful individual races; it should be to create an interconnected sports-tourism economy in which events stimulate travel, travel stimulates spending, spending stimulates enterprise and successful visitor experiences create repeat tourism.
The Finish Line Is an Economic Starting Point
The story of Uganda’s destination marathons is therefore not fundamentally about running; it is about movement. People move into destinations, money moves through businesses, customers move through local marketplaces, opportunities move towards entrepreneurs, images and stories move across social media, and visitors can move from the racecourse into national parks, mountains, restaurants, communities and other tourism experiences. Kasese demonstrates the economics of scale and visitor acquisition, Fort Portal demonstrates destination integration and commercial activation, Kisoro connects sport with conservation and environmental assets, while Gulu demonstrates the potential of sport to contribute to economic activity and destination repositioning. Together, these emerging models suggest that Uganda may be developing something considerably bigger than a calendar of running events.
A marathon can therefore be much more than 42 kilometres. It can represent a hotel booking, a restaurant bill, a boda boda journey, a farmer’s sale, a tour operator’s customer, a young person’s job, an investor’s market signal, a destination’s international advertisement and a community’s opportunity. The smartest question may consequently no longer be simply who won the marathon, but how many people and businesses can win because the marathon happened? When a visitor comes to run but stays to eat, sleep, explore, spend, invest and eventually return, the finish line is no longer where the economic story ends. It is where it begins.
