FROM POLICY TO PROSPERITY: Uganda’s Tenfold Growth In A Rapidly Changing Global Economy, The Growth Requires A New Era Of Value Addition, Private Investment And Technology-Driven Productivity

Last week, we attended the Economic growth forum. Well, Uganda has never suffered from a shortage of ideas. Our challenge has too often been converting good ideas into sustained economic outcomes. The Tenfold Growth Strategy therefore represents more than an economic target, it is a national execution challenge; a determination to transform Uganda from a largely factor-driven economy into a productive, export-oriented, technology-enabled and value-adding economy.

The ambition is audacious: grow the economy from roughly US$53 billion to US$500 billion by 2040, effectively doubling GDP every five years. The Strategy targets higher savings and investment, rapid export growth, stronger human and physical capital and a dramatic increase in value-added exports.

Uganda has reason for optimism. Real GDP grew by 6.3% in FY2024/25, while agriculture, industry and services all contributed to expansion. Yet the World Bank cautions that too much economic activity remains concentrated in low-productivity and climate-vulnerable agriculture and informal employment. The next leap must therefore be qualitative, not merely quantitative.

The ATMS architecture: Agro-industrialisation, Tourism, Mineral-based industrial development including oil and gas and Science, Technology and Innovation is therefore exactly the right direction. But ATMS must become more than a policy acronym. It must become Uganda’s economic operating system. The most important question is implementation.

As the Secretary to the Treasury, Dr. Ramathan Ggoobi rightly observed, Uganda has developed many good policies, but the missing policy is often the policy on implementation, the machinery that ensures that an approved policy becomes a funded programme, a completed project, a functioning factory, an export contract or a measurable improvement in household income. Government technocrats deserve considerable appreciation for the quality of policy architecture already developed. The task now is to match that intellectual capital with an equally powerful execution culture.

This requires a national delivery compact. Every ATMS intervention should have a clear owner, funding source, implementation timetable, measurable KPI, independent monitoring and consequence management. We should stop measuring development primarily by money allocated and start measuring it by capital absorbed, projects completed, exports generated, jobs created, productivity increased and taxes collected.

Agriculture cannot remain a producer of raw commodities while others capture the value through processing, branding, logistics and distribution. Coffee must become roasted and branded coffee, milk must become cheese, yoghurt and specialised dairy products, fruits must become concentrates and minerals must feed manufacturing.

The private sector must be central to this transformation. NDP IV anticipates approximately 30.4% of its Shs593.6 trillion resource requirement from the private sector. That capital will not arrive through appeals; it will follow bankable opportunities, predictable regulation, credible projects and appropriate risk-sharing instruments. Government must crowd in, not crowd out, private capital through Public Private Partnerships, blended finance, development finance, patient capital, targeted tax incentives where genuine strategic public-interest projects require risk mitigation. Guarantees must have strict fiscal guardrails, transparent contingent-liability reporting and value-for-money tests.

Uganda must also dramatically improve capital absorption. An unspent development budget is not prudence if a critical road, irrigation scheme, industrial park or digital infrastructure remains unfinished. Externally funded project absorption is explicitly identified as an implementation priority in the Tenfold Strategy.

The tax base must expand alongside the economy. Uganda cannot finance a US$500 billion economy on a narrow formal tax base. Digitalisation, e-invoicing, formalisation, better property and land information, customs intelligence and AI-enabled compliance can broaden the base without simply increasing the burden on compliant taxpayers. Current revenue mobilisation remains constrained, making domestic revenue expansion indispensable to fiscal sustainability.

AI will be a force multiplier. Uganda should embrace open-source AI models where appropriate, build national data capabilities and deploy AI in agriculture, tax administration, health, education, tourism, credit, logistics and public-service delivery. But innovation requires guardrails and therefore cybersecurity, data protection, ethical standards, human oversight, responsible procurement and clear accountability should be in place.

Our chambers of commerce, industry associations, banks, universities and professional bodies should become economic mobilisation platforms, not merely advocacy institutions. Each should own measurable contributions to exports, investment, innovation, skills and formalisation.

As Peter Drucker observed, “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” Jim Collins reminds us that great organisations confront brutal facts while retaining faith in the future. That is the mindset Uganda now needs.

We need to think through value chains and ecosystems, not individual borrowers. That is how Uganda moves from economic activity to economic multiplication. The ambition must be to create an Uganda where capital circulates faster, businesses transact more efficiently, local suppliers participate more deeply and more of the value created from Ugandan resources is captured within Uganda. As Michael Porter taught us, competitive advantage is increasingly created through clusters and interconnected activities, not isolated firms. Are we building bigger sectors, or are we building bigger economic ecosystems?

In a nutshell, the Tenfold Strategy is achievable, but only if policy becomes execution, capital becomes productive investment, agriculture becomes industry, commodities become brands, technology becomes productivity and growth becomes prosperity. The economic question before Uganda is no longer whether we have the potential. It is whether we have the discipline to execute it. The next fifteen years must therefore be Uganda’s era of execution.

The writer is the General Manager, Commercial Banking at Centenary Bank