The Role of Regulatory Institutions in Promoting Effective Corporate Governance in Uganda: A Systematic Literature

Corporate governance failures have repeatedly shaped Uganda's financial and public sectors, yet scholarly and professional evidence on how regulatory institutions promote effective governance is scattered across disciplines and source types. This paper reports a systematic literature review, structured around the PRISMA 2020 reporting principles, of 18 sources identified through structured searches of open scholarly, repository, regulatory, professional and law-reporting sources in October 2026. A thematic synthesis, informed by agency theory, stakeholder theory, institutional theory and responsive regulation, yields five findings. First, Uganda's governance architecture is sector-fragmented, combining statutory regulators, line ministries, audit and anti-corruption bodies and a voluntary professional institute without enforcement powers. Second, the most rigorous evidence indicates that codification has outpaced enforcement, with corruption and weak underlying frameworks limiting the effect of codes. Third, reform has been reactive, recurring after bank failures and most recently through the Financial Institutions (Corporate Governance) Regulations 2024. Fourth, evidence on state-owned enterprises is dominated by unpublished case studies reporting weak boards and accountability gaps. Fifth, litigation arising from the Crane Bank takeover shows that regulators' own powers are bounded by statutory procedure and judicial oversight. The review identifies gaps, chiefly the absence of peer-reviewed evaluations of enforcement outcomes, and sets out implications for research, policy and practice. Because the evidence base was assembled from open sources rather than subscription databases, the findings should be treated as a structured, transparent synthesis and not an exhaustive census.