Published on 2/06/26 by Harry Musango

Talk to almost any female real estate agent who has worked in Kampala for more than a year and a version of the same story emerges. A client who seemed professional in messaging becomes uncomfortable in person. A viewing scheduled at an occupied apartment turns out to have no other people present. A landlord in a remote plot in Gayaza or Najjera uses the isolation to say something inappropriate. In the less reported cases, the situation escalates further.

Uganda's real estate sector employs a significant number of women, particularly at the agent and property management levels. Their job description requires them to enter unfamiliar spaces, often unfinished, often isolated, often in low-density residential areas like Kigo, Buziga, or the outer Wakiso belt, with people they have met only through a phone call. The industry has largely treated this as a personal risk to be individually managed rather than a structural challenge requiring collective solutions.

This contrasts with how the sector approaches other professional risks. Physical site safety, hard hats, scaffolding standards, electrical compliance, is increasingly documented and regulated. The social safety of women navigating the same sites in a client-facing capacity receives almost no equivalent attention.

The responses that do exist have come informally and bottom-up. Experienced female agents share informal protocols: always tell a colleague the viewing address and expected return time; avoid entering basement units alone; check whether a location has mobile signal before committing to a visit. Some agencies have introduced check-in systems. Most have not.

Professional presentation has emerged as one additional, imperfect layer of protection. Several female agents interviewed for this piece described how deliberately formal clothing, specifically longer, structured garments that communicate professional authority rather than social availability, changes the dynamics of ambiguous interactions in the field. It does not eliminate risk, but it alters the social framing of an encounter in ways that matter.

This is the context in which brands like Kaftan Collections 7 have found an unlikely professional use case. Originally positioned as modest ladies' fashion, their garments have been adopted by working women in field-based roles specifically because the coverage and structure they offer creates a visual professional boundary that conventional corporate wear does not. It is a partial, informal, market-generated response to a structural problem. The more important work, agency-level safety protocols, industry standards, and the cultural shift required to treat female agent safety as a property sector issue, remains largely unstarted.