In Uganda, Practicing as a Traditional Healer Without a License Can Cost You 20 Million Shillings

Uganda sits at a fascinating intersection of colonial legal heritage and modern public health reform. For decades, traditional healers operated in a near-legal vacuum — the only national law was the colonial-era Witchcraft Act of 1957, inherited from British rule, which criminalized witchcraft but offered no framework for regulating healers or distinguishing genuine practitioners from fraudsters. Academic and medical studies noted that as many as 60–80% of Ugandans rely on traditional medicine as their first port of call, yet there was 'no institutionalized framework for governing traditional healers.'

The regulatory void had serious consequences: rampant child sacrifice linked to ritual healers, quack doctors mixing antiretrovirals and Viagra into herbal remedies without disclosure, and unlicensed 'healers' responsible for patient deaths. In 2009, Parliament debated the issue and called for action. After years of advocacy, Uganda passed the Traditional and Complementary Medicine Act in February 2019. The Act creates a licensing and registration council, sets standards, and imposes substantial fines on unlicensed operators. Local-level enforcement has also been active — in Rakai district, for example, authorities screened and registered 300 witch doctors and shrines in 2016 after a surge in child sacrifice cases. The 'witch doctor' label itself remains legally fraught: under the 1957 Witchcraft Act, being a 'witch doctor' is treated differently (and more punitively) than being a licensed traditional healer, meaning many practitioners hide behind healer certificates to avoid prosecution. The 2019 Act is widely seen as a long-overdue modernization, though enforcement remains uneven and translation of the law into local languages is still underway.