For more than a decade, Uber helped change the way millions of Nigerians and Ugandans moved through their cities.
In Lagos, its arrival introduced a generation of commuters to the now-familiar ritual of summoning a car with a few taps on a smartphone. In Kampala, it offered a similarly modern alternative to the city’s traditional transport system, promising a cheaper, safer and more predictable way to get around.
Now, that ride is over.
Global ride-hailing company Uber has announced that it is winding down operations in Nigeria and Uganda, bringing an abrupt end to its presence in two African markets where it helped popularise app-based transportation.
The shutdown took effect on Wednesday, September 2, 2026.
In an email to its customers, Uber said the exits followed a “thorough review” of its business and would affect only Nigeria and Uganda, with its operations elsewhere in Africa remaining unchanged.
The announcement closes a 12-year chapter in Nigeria and a decade-long run in Uganda. But Uber’s departure from the two countries is also unfolding against a much larger transformation inside one of the world’s biggest mobility companies.
Uber is simultaneously cutting about 3,300 jobs, or roughly 10% of its global workforce, as it strips away layers of management, consolidates teams and redirects people and capital towards what it considers its biggest opportunities for future growth.
How Uber arrived and changed the ride-hailing game
When Uber arrived in Lagos in 2014, Nigeria’s urban transport industry looked very different.
Getting around Africa’s largest city was largely a matter of private cars, yellow commercial taxis, buses and the familiar, often unpredictable negotiations that came with finding a driver willing to take a passenger to a particular destination.
The idea that a passenger could open an app, enter a destination, see an estimated fare and watch a driver approach on a map was still relatively novel.
Uber entered that environment with precisely that proposition.
The company launched in Lagos in 2014, making the city its first market in West Africa. Within months, it introduced its lower-cost UberX service, helping push ride-hailing beyond a premium service and towards the mainstream urban transport market. However, in South Africa, the firm has ended UberX.
By 2016, Uber said it had facilitated more than one million trips in Lagos and had expanded to Abuja. Over the following years, its footprint widened into cities including Benin City, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, Kano, Enugu and Warri.
The effect was larger than Uber itself.
Its success helped prove that there was a sizeable market for app-based transportation in Nigeria, creating the conditions for an increasingly crowded industry that would later attract rivals such as Bolt and inDrive, alongside local operators including Lagos-backed LagRide.
In Uganda, Uber’s arrival followed a similar script.
The company launched in Kampala on June 2, 2016, as part of its rapidly expanding African network. At the time, Uber presented itself as a modern complement to existing transport options in a city where traditional taxis and informal transport systems dominated everyday mobility.
Kampala became the 462nd city globally to join Uber’s network. The company launched with promotional free rides and said it had already signed up hundreds of drivers, positioning the service as an affordable, safe and reliable alternative for urban commuters.
Also Check: Uber to end UberX in South Africa from September
Why Uber is leaving Nigeria and Uganda
Uber has not publicly provided a detailed financial breakdown explaining precisely why Nigeria and Uganda were selected for exit.
Instead, the company said its decision followed a review of its evolving business priorities and investment focus across Africa.
“After a thorough review, we have taken the difficult decision to wind down operations in Nigeria and Uganda, effective September 2, 2026,” the company said.
Behind that corporate explanation, however, is a ride-hailing market that has become markedly different from the one Uber entered more than a decade ago.
Despite its first-mover advantage, Uber has spent much of the past several years competing with increasingly aggressive rivals, particularly Bolt and inDrive, which have used pricing, lower commissions and locally adapted business models to win over drivers and passengers.
Bolt, formerly known as Taxify, entered Lagos in 2016, two years after Uber. By 2020, reports estimated that the company controlled about 60% of Nigeria’s ride-hailing market by volume.
Its expansion continued. In 2023, Bolt said it had completed its 250 millionth ride in Nigeria since launching in the country, illustrating the scale it had built in a market where Uber was once the dominant international brand.
Then came inDrive.
The company entered Nigeria in 2019 but differentiated itself through a pricing system that challenged one of the central features of conventional ride-hailing platforms.
Rather than allowing an algorithm alone to determine fares, inDrive lets passengers propose a price for a journey while drivers can accept the offer or make a counterbid.
That bargaining model brought something familiar to Nigeria’s traditionally negotiation-heavy transport system into the digital age, while giving price-sensitive passengers greater control over what they paid.
The company also expanded beyond passenger transportation into other services, including delivery, increasing the number of ways consumers could use its platform.
Data from about 5,000 delivery orders placed through inDrive in Nigeria between January and June showed that clothing and footwear accounted for 39.5% of classified orders, followed by food and drinks at 27.8%, while cosmetics, beauty products and eyewear accounted for another 10%.
But perhaps the more consequential difference between Uber and its newer rivals has been the economics offered to drivers.
inDrive, which has emerged as one of Nigeria’s most downloaded ride-hailing apps, charges drivers a commission of about 10% per trip. Bolt’s commission can reach about 30%, while Uber charges as much as 35%.
Those differences become significant when multiplied across dozens of trips every week.
Uber’s challenge, therefore, was no longer simply attracting people to ride-hailing. It was retaining drivers and passengers in a market where competitors had begun offering different answers to the fundamental question of how much a ride should cost — and how much of that fare the driver should keep.
Uber’s Nigerian exit also came days after a dispute involving ride-hailing operations at airports managed by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria.
FAAN had moved to introduce tighter requirements for e-hailing companies, citing safety, security and accountability concerns. The resulting disruption temporarily affected some platforms.
The timing inevitably raised questions about whether the dispute contributed to Uber’s departure.
Uber rejected that interpretation, saying its decision was unrelated to the FAAN issue and instead reflected its broader review of business priorities and investment across Africa.
Also Check: BuuPass expands into corporate travel, eyes Africa’s $10.6bn business travel market
Inside Uber’s global restructuring
Nigeria and Uganda are also disappearing from Uber’s map at a moment when the company is remaking itself globally.
In an internal email to employees, which was later published on the firm’s website, Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi announced that Uber was cutting about 10% of its workforce as part of a broader attempt to remove management layers, simplify teams and concentrate investment around its biggest opportunities.
Importantly, Khosrowshahi said the restructuring was not the result of weak business performance.
Uber’s top line has nearly tripled over the past five years as the company expanded into new products and businesses. But that expansion, he said, also produced “more layers, more coordination, more fragmented ownership.”
Uber is now trying to unwind some of that complexity.
“A leaner organization will mean clearer ownership, faster decisions, and more time spent building rather than coordinating. It will also generate savings that we intend to reinvest in growth, innovation, and the capabilities that will matter most over the coming years, Khosrowshahi said in the email.
