MJAMR

Corporate Risk Management and Crisis Response in Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), Uganda

Luwedde Luyiga Zaharah, Irumba Alex


Abstract

This study examined corporate risk management frameworks, crisis response capabilities, and the structural determinants of effective risk governance at Kampala Capital City Authority; Uganda's most complex local government institution, managing the capital city's infrastructure, services, planning, and enforcement functions across a metropolitan area of over 3.5 million residents and serving as the primary institutional vehicle for Kampala's economic and spatial development. KCCA's operational environment combined the risk complexity of a major municipal government encompassing public infrastructure failure, environmental hazards, urban flooding, fire outbreaks, pandemic response, and regulatory compliance risks with the political complexity of a directly appointed authority operating under dual accountability to the elected Kampala Mayor and the appointed Executive Director in a governance arrangement that created distinctive risk management challenges not present in conventional local government or private sector risk frameworks. Drawing on a cross-sectional survey of 247 respondents comprising KCCA departmental directors, technical officers, risk management unit staff, Kampala Metropolitan Police, urban planning officials, civil society representatives, and business operators in Kampala's central division, supplemented by analysis of KCCA's risk register documentation, crisis response incident records, and audit reports, this study employed descriptive statistics, hierarchy-of-controls crisis response analysis, bivariate Pearson correlation and chisquare association, and multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression to examine the determinants of risk management effectiveness and crisis response quality. The findings demonstrated that risk identification comprehensiveness (β = 0.574, p < .001), inter-departmental risk communication quality (β = 0.541, p < .001), and crisis response plan activation fidelity (β = 0.512, p < .001) were the strongest independent predictors of risk management effectiveness, while institutional factors including leadership risk culture (OR = 7.12, p < .001), digital early warning system adoption (OR = 5.84, p < .001), and staff risk management training (OR = 5.41, p < .001) were the strongest structural predictors. The study benchmarks its findings against Asiimwe et al. (2026), drawing the parallel that KCCA's crisis response effectiveness depended on the same complementarity of institutional infrastructure and human capacity that Asiimwe et al. demonstrated for CBE implementation readiness with digital early warning systems constituting the infrastructure dimension and staff risk management training constituting the human capacity dimension whose joint development was required for effective crisis response. The study recommended KCCA risk register operationalization, inter-departmental crisis coordination protocol strengthening, and digital urban risk monitoring investment, leadership risk culture development, and community risk communication improvement as the five priorities for a comprehensive corporate risk management reform agenda.

Keywords

Corporate Risk Management Crisis Response and Kampala Capital City Authority
Metropolitan Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research

Cite This Article

Luwedde Luyiga Zaharah & Irumba Alex (2026). Corporate Risk Management and Crisis Response in Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), Uganda. Metropolitan Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research, 5(9). https://journals.miu.ac.ug/pages/article.php?article_id=1895

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