Recent challenges, including the Covid-19 pandemic and conflicts around the world, have negatively impacted Uganda’s domestic revenue collection, and changed donor countries’ aid policies, widening Uganda’s budget deficit. Moreover, official development assistance (ODA) now faces enormous pressures from growing, competing demands, including humanitarian and crisis response, national development priorities and investment in global public goods. Development Initiatives (DI) seeks to highlight the value of ODA in programmes that are national priorities to recipient countries. Additionally, DI aims to enhance the understanding of enabling factors that contribute to improving aid impact. Led by national demand for international finance data and evidence on its most appropriate use, DI embarked on producing a series of country case study reports to consider how aid has been effective in specific development sectors in Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda, including trends, the factors that unlock the value of aid, and the challenges that lie ahead. This country report for Uganda provides evidence on the role and contribution ODA in the delivery of social assistance programmes. It first provides a background and overview of ODA disbursements to Uganda – both generally and specifically to the social protection sector. Then, drawing on secondary data obtained from various impact evaluation studies and key informant interviews, the report highlights how ODA and other factors have enabled the establishment and implementation of Uganda’s flagship Expanding Social Protection (ESP) programme.