By Lindah Nduwumwami
Poverty eradication is the fundamental objective of Uganda’s development strategy. Consequently, the government has come up with different projects to increase household incomes. However some of these projects never get to achieve their intended goals. As a way of improving efficiency and accountability in service delivery and public projects, the Office of the President has now launched a forum that will ensure effective public policy oversight management.
The Apex Platform will be an annual gathering during which the President the President will sit with officials from the Office of the Prime minister, National Planning Authority, Ministry of Finance and the Presidency to evaluate the Government's Annual Performance against set objectives.
On the 13th of November, 2019, as a solution to expensive projects that never deliver, the office of the president has launched a forum that will ensure efficient implementation of demand based projects.
According to Vincent Tumusiime, directorate of social economic monitoring research in the office of the president, the platform will be important as it will allow all stakeholders to sit together to appreciate what is achieved from a government intervention. So that all stakeholders can learn from successes for successor projects and also try to correct any future mistakes from the failures.
According to research, the Office of the president continues to register implementation challenges across all sectors in spite of the National Development Plan I and National Development Plan II and M&E Frameworks through RDCs/DRDCs, ISO and other Agencies under the presidency. According to Country Performance Reports written by Development Partners, over the past decade, for every dollar invested in Uganda’s capital infrastructure, only 7/10 of a dollar is generated.
Dr. Joseph Muvawala, the Executive Director National Planning Authority while speaking to Next Radio on the sidelines of the launch, said what the President’s Office is doing is simply reinforcing their work and doing it in a participatory way.
The launch of the forum, economists also advised the office of the president to actively include civil society and put into action recommendations from the research to ensure results.
Contrary to a World Bank report released in 2016 that says Uganda’s economy has the potential to grow at an average rate of 10% per annum if the country operated at a higher level of efficiency. The report further ranked Uganda in the 46th position out of 71 countries in terms of quality of institutions for public investment management.
The aim of the Apex Platform is to improve participation of non state actors, including academicians, researchers, development partners into the government implementation architecture and to facilitate utilization of evidence based action focused on recommendations in aiding executive decisions to address effective implementation of Government programs/projects and promote good governance practices to the development challenges.