Men at work in a Uganda village           Photo courtesy

With the NRM’s 27th anniversary now behind us, it is clear that the basic fundamentals for creating a future where all of us have freedom from want and need are clear. Through feedback from my media engagements over the past few months, I have learnt that the increasing challenge for Uganda’s enduring stability and prosperity is creation of meaningful and rewarding jobs for citizens of Uganda.

Make no mistake, unless we deepen industrialisation, modernise agriculture, relegate impediments to private sector growth and make regional integration practical - we are in big trouble.

Every year, Uganda churns out 300,000 graduates with only 40,000 available jobs. The rest, 260,000, become hustlers (kuyiya). If we work and legislate to refine Uganda’s private sector environment, the 260,000 would engage in self employment and as a result create more jobs. 

You see, for 2013, going forward, the private sector; (MSMEs) annual employment growth is estimated at 20 per cent per annum but the majority of the businesses (35 percent) are aged between 1 and 5 years and those that are 25 years or more are only 4 percent. It is clear from these figures that the failure rate in business start-ups is high.

The high mortality rate for business start-ups is explained by the burdensome regulatory environment and the rising cost of doing business on account of inadequate infrastructure, costly and unreliable electricity, rising cost of fuel, and the high cost of business finance. Other factors include corruption, unnecessary bureaucracy and capacity constraints in the various public institutions. What are our members of Parliament doing? Can we see them debate and resolve these jobs killing constraints? Why should Uganda be a graveyard of startups and nimble entrepreneurial ideas?

In spite of businesses failure to survive, Ugandans are not ready to shark- they continue to come up with ideas. For example, over 9000 new firms are registered each year.  Though still a small number, this is good news; it shows that the attitude for doing and formalising business is taking shape. It also splits the bare fact that if we help these business ideas to survive, we will be able to find jobs for millions of our youth. What should vastly concern us are the reasons why most of these registered start-ups never reach their 5th birthday. The death of business start ups means death of jobs. How can these ideas be supported? I wish to begin with three ideas.

Fierce urgency to Harvest the demographic dividend

Uganda’s population is 33 million. With 7 children per woman (average), Uganda’s population will be over 130 million in the next fifty years. What should concern us is the quality of the population. Is our population skilled, imaginative, agile, curious, entrepreneurial, and self reliant and inspired? Or rather, semi skilled, subsistence, surviving and thriving, nature based (chance based), welfarelist (waiting for handouts), laid back and cynical?

Our people are the only enduring wealth that this country has. We must invest in them; leaders at all levels must inspire them in words and actions and align them to a common vision. I know that Enterprise Uganda is conducting entrepreneurship training, business advisory and counselling service, information, business planning, marketing, technology, business linkages and targeting young people, women, business start-ups and middle level firms. In the 2010/2011 budget, Enterprise Uganda was allocated one billion Uganda shillings and even more in 2012/2013 budget. This was a good effort – Enterprise Uganda should present to Ugandans a jobs report. How many jobs have their activities created? How many jobs have their trainings and coaching engineered? The foregoing should be supplemented by an Entrepreneurship Fund, long term and accessed at 5% interest rate. The idea of establishing a School Leavers Industrial Training Fund must be de-shelved and implemented.

Arrest Uganda’s productivity and skills deficiency

Ugandan firms have, on average, the lowest labour productivity in the EAC, even when compared to other firms within Sub-Saharan Africa, and much lower than that in China and India. Studies indicate that Tanzania’s labour productivity is 40% higher than Uganda’s; while Kenya’s labour productivity is 60% higher, meaning that a worker from either Kenya or Tanzania has a higher job output compared to their Ugandan counterpart. Our parliament must provide money to kick start reform of BTVET (Business Technical Vocational Education and Training) from input based training to competence based education and training (CBET) through the Uganda Vocational Qualifications Framework (UVQF). If properly implemented, go a long way in ensuring that the quality of BTVET graduates meets the labour market demands not only in Uganda, but across Africa.

Stop budget leakages and runaway public administration expenditure

World Bank reports indicate that UGX100 billion is lost in public procurement alone. Public administration expenditure take a whooping 23% share of the national budget, the newly created 17 districts will cost us 28 billion in the coming financial year (money equivalent to drilling of 1030 boreholes)! And at a population of 33 million and GDP of $16 Billion Uganda runs a parliament of 375 MPS! India with 1 billion people and a GDP of $2698 runs a parliament of 769 MPs.

Norway with 4.6 million people has only 43 MPs. I think, as a country, we badly need to reflect on the cost of this over representation. I therefore wish to recommend that we adopt proportional/ per capita representation of 200,000 population quota. At 33 million, we will have only 165 MPs. The foregoing action will mean that as a country, we will save UGX252 billion, money that can be channelled to job creating and productive sectors of the economy. Balkanisation of Uganda into smalls districts should also be reviewed, halted and rolled back and emphasis be put on service delivery. Can our Parliament debate and resolve these self imposed constraints to transformation?

By Morrison Rwakakamba
Chief Executive Officer, Agency for Transformation
[email protected]