Every agency pitch this year leans digital-first. The newest Ipsos NAMS numbers tell a more complicated story, one where radio still reaches more Ugandans than any other medium, and social media’s real strength is narrower and more specific than the hype suggests.
If you’ve sat through a media strategy pitch in Kampala this year, you’ve likely heard some version of the same pitch: “Shift more budget to digital, because that’s where the audience is going,” they say. The newest Ipsos NAMS Wave 3 2026 data, released in recent weeks, tells a more precise and considerably less convenient story for that argument.
The Real Numbers
Radio’s past-7-day reach nationally sits at 82%, still the single most dominant medium in the country, and not by a small margin. Television reaches 44% of Ugandans in the same window. Social media reaches 33%, and instant messaging apps (WhatsApp and similar) sit just ahead of social media at 34%. Newspapers, by contrast, reach just 9%, a genuinely niche medium now, not a mass one.
That gap between radio and social media (82% vs 33%) is the number every “digital-first” pitch deck should have to reckon with before it recommends a full budget shift.
| Medium | National | Urban | Rural | Notable split |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Radio | 82% | 73% | 88% | Strong nationwide: the only medium with no weak region |
| Television | 44% | 56% | 36% | Central region 66% vs Northern 27% |
| Instant Messaging | 34% | — | — | No urban/rural split reported |
| Social Media | 33% | 45% | 25% | Peaks at 42% (ages 18–29), falls to 9% at 55+ |
| Newspapers | 9% | — | — | 24% among wealthiest tier, 5% among poorest |
Reach Isn’t Evenly Distributed: That’s the Real Story
The national averages hide the more useful insight: that each medium’s strength is geographically and demographically specific.
Radio is genuinely universal. It reaches 88% of rural Uganda and 73% of urban Uganda, meaningfully strong in both, and the only medium that can credibly claim to be “the voice” outside the cities. For a campaign that needs true national reach, nothing else in the current data comes close.
Television seems to still be an urban and Central-region phenomenon. Nationally it reaches 44%, but that splits sharply (56% urban vs just 36% rural). Regionally, the reach gap is still 66% in the Central region against 31% in the Eastern region, 27% in the Northern region, and 42% in the Western region. TV doesn’t rule the nation. It rules the city, and specifically the capital region.
Social media’s strength is real, but narrow. It skews heavily urban (45% vs 25% rural) and heavily among young audiences: reach peaks at 42% among both the 18–24 and 25–29 segments, and falls to just 9% among Ugandans 55 and older.
Even within the youngest segment measured (18–24), radio still reaches 77% of them, nearly double social media’s 42%.
Ipsos NAMS Wave 3 2026
Newspapers have become an elite-access medium, not a mass one. At 9% overall reach, readership climbs to 24% among the wealthiest tier and as low as 5% among the lowest. This is now a channel for reaching decision-makers and high-net-worth audiences deliberately, not for building broad awareness.
Why This Isn’t Just About Preference
These patterns aren’t purely cultural; they’re structural. Roughly a third of Ugandans own a smartphone, meaning the constraint isn’t universal device access, it’s a mix of affordability, data costs, and electricity reliability. TV penetration by wealth tier makes this concrete: it rises from 23% among the lowest standard-of-living bracket to 77% among the highest, aligning almost exactly with electricity access, which rises from near-zero in the poorest bracket to 96% in the wealthiest two. A “digital-first” strategy implicitly assumes infrastructure most of the country doesn’t yet have. That’s not a preference gap. It’s an access gap, and it will close on its own timeline, not a media planner’s.
