The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives has held a meeting with board members of the Presidential CEO Forum for Uganda, where they discussed how to strengthen collaboration between the two institutions. aimed at achieving Uganda’s strategy of expanding the size of the economy to $500 billion by 2040.

The meeting chaired by the Minister of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives Sanjay Tanna, and attended by the Minister of State for Trade Gen. Wilson Mbasu Mbadi, and the chairman of the Presidential CEO Forum and the Executive Chairman of Cipla Quality Chemicals Industries Limited, Mr Emmanuel Katongole, noted that the CEO Forum desires a strong working relationship with the Ministry of Trade to address the bottlenecks faced by manufacturers and industrialists that are contributing to the rising cost of doing business. 

Mr Katongole said among the most pressing challenges is the increasing number of substandard products on the Ugandan market that outcompete the genuine products of registered manufacturers, and the delays in certification of products.

“Many people are duplicating our products. We have engaged UNBS on the issue of certification and the substandard products on the market; however, little has been done to address these issues. Our complaints to UNBS also take long to be responded to,” Mr Katongole said.

He also noted that the fragmented supply chains, the limited access to finance, the limited value addition to Ugandan products, coupled with the increasing corruption, have crippled the country’s industrialisation agenda.

 “Most of our products leave the country with limited or no processing, and therefore, we end up exporting the jobs and incomes for our people,” he said.

Mr Katongole added that the government and the private sector alone cannot independently solve all these bottlenecks to Uganda’s industrialisation agenda. He called for a coordinated execution framework founded on trust, evidence, and continuous dialogue.

Mr Deo Kayemba, a board member of the Presidential CEO Forum and Managing Director East African Roofing Systems Limited, emphasised the need to strengthen the capacity of UNBS saying “quality is the key passport to the market.” He urged the Ministry of Trade to expedite the implementation of the competition law to regulate the big players in the market and protect the MSMEs from the big players, who receive incentives from the government.  

Gen. Mbadi said the Ministry of Trade is working closely with UNBS to enhance the agency’s capacity to address the challenge of substandard products and with the recently enhanced UNBS budget, the amount of time taken to certify products has reduced from four months to one and half to two months, and the time taken to clear imported products has also tremendously reduced from 10 to 15 days to three hours for compliant clients.

Gen. Mbadi reiterated the ministry’s commitment to sustaining the markets that Uganda has negotiated by ensuring that the country has the right quality and quantities.

“We need to build a robust cooperative union to boost production, address the Non-Tariff Barriers, especially with our neighbours in the EAC, give support to our MSMEs and reduce time for clearance at the borders to boost trade,” Gen. Mbadi said.

Mr Tanna acknowledged that there are some unscrupulous individuals within UNBS that his ministry is going to deal with to ensure that the agency serves the purpose for which it was established.

He added that Uganda’s Ten-fold Growth Strategy is attainable because the government has already laid a foundation by working on the infrastructure, especially the roads, power supply, and water supply, among others, and also provided security. What needs to be done is to work with technocrats to ensure that government programmes reach the intended beneficiaries.

Minister Tanna advised the Presidential CEO Forum to change the way they are doing things and use the platform to properly guide the investors.

He urged them to work with his ministry to develop a digitised electronic database for all industries in Uganda.

“We have failed to properly plan for our people because we do not have the correct statistics, with each institution producing its own figures,” Mr Tanna said.

He urged all stakeholders to put emphasis on skilling Ugandans instead of accumulating paper qualifications, saying industries are looking for skilled people, not qualifications.