Ministry of Finance officials announcing their partnership with Makerere University
The Ministry of Finance has partnered with Makerere University to start training its own public investment managers in order to save billions government spends in training its officials abroad.
This was revealed by Hannington Ashaba, Commissioner Public Analysis and Public Investment at Ministry of Finance during a press briefing at Ministry Headquarters yesterday where he announced partnership with World Bank and Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.
Ashaba said that the training will be carried out at Makerere University Centre of Public Investment Management after realizing that the cost of sending one officer to train can train four others if done in Uganda.
“The cost of sending one official abroad is huge and as I indicated, you need about $12,000 (about Shs43.16m) to send one individual to some of those prestigious universities which give top notch qualification in this area. So we only sent a few, and these few have been able to able to bring the curriculum to Makerere University. So instead of sending 45 officials, we are training them using the same skills and methodology,” explained Ashaba.
Rachel Sebudde, Senior Economist at World Bank’s Africa, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Unit, said the latest investment in capacity building is geared towards enabling Uganda meet its loan obligation.
She remarked, “We bring lots of resources as grants, as loans to government but if we don’t address those soft issues, even those funds are going to be wasted. You wouldn’t have realized the reason why you invested and the common man has to pay the taxes to make sure the loans have to be paid up.”
According to the Ministry of Finance, the course has already been piloted and trained 45 officials that will train Ugandans locally at Makerere University and the course is open to both private and public sector and will end money spent on sending officials to Harvard University, Duke University, Queens University in Canada.
Ashaba defended the latest move saying it is in line with Government’s policy of rationalizing resources and fostering posterity in use of public resources, after realizing that despite sinking in so much money in public projects, the returns on investment remain dismal thus the need to improve efficiency in implementation of public investment and enable Uganda pay its debts and generate domestic revenue.
He said, “Some of our projects aren’t performing as expected because the required capacity in contract and project management is still weak.
There is also a problem of poor operation and maintenance of our assets, when we create assets we don’t adequately maintain them and this is an endemic challenge that needs to be tackled so we can have a balance between infrastructure development and mentainance of assets to give them a long life.”
Asked if the new course won’t lead to duplication of courses at Makerere University, Ashaba said, “This is going to be a specialized course, in fact it is going to be an Executive course for four weeks, you do two weeks modular, first in financial analysis then economic analysis so that you have an integrated overview of a project so you come out fully baked as an investment expert.”
Sebudde defended the latest decision saying, “It is about $10,000 to $12,000 and in addition to that, you have to cater for transport because the others are just fees. So if you wanted to send say 10 people to Canada, you just get to expatriates.”
