Speaker @ObothOboth today officially opened the first Annual Review Workshop of the Legislation, Oversight and Representation (LOR) Programme in the 12th Parliament, with a call to all partners and actors to own the programme by helping set priorities, implement the action plan and account for results. The workshop, organised by Parliament’s Corporate Planning and Strategy Department, reviewed how the LOR Programme performed in the first year of the Fourth National Development Plan (NDP IV) and Government’s Tenfold Growth Strategy. Among those who attended include; Deputy Speaker @Thomas_Tayebwa, who closed the workshop, Clerk to Parliament Hon. Adolf Mwesige, Commissioners of Parliament, staff and officials from the National Planning Authority (NPA).

Today, I had the honour of delivering the Keynote address at the APEX Platform High-Level Dialogue on a critical theme of “Re-engineering Uganda's Development Financing Architecture for Socio-Economic Transformation”. This Dialogue was organised by APEX Platform under the Office of the President. It was officiated by the Head of Service @LNakyobe and the Hon. Minister for Presidency, @millybabalanda A development financing architecture articulates the arrangement of institutions, markets, instruments, policies and rules through which a country mobilises resources, channels them into investment, allocates risks and holds participants accountable for results. This architecture operates across four distinct institutional layers, including primary capital providers, intermediary institutions, capital allocators, and regulators. The key element is connecting all these components to national development priorities so as to deliver development results. An effective and efficient development financing architecture is characterised by several tenets. These include: 1.Clarity and alignment to the development priorities it must serve and the investments required to deliver them. For Uganda, our Strategic Direction is clear, including the Uganda Vision 2040, the Ten-Fold Growth Strategy and NDP IV. 2.It must mobilise a broad and dependable resource base. Development finance must be contributed to by different instruments, including; domestic revenue, household and enterprise savings, pension contributions, insurance funds and external capital, among others. 3.Deliver financing on terms that allow our development priorities to become viable investments. 4.Allocate resources to investments that are properly selected, prepared and sequenced to deliver national development priorities. 5.Establish how public and private finance will work together to deliver these investments. I acknowledged the strong foundations we have built as a country, including peace, security, macroeconomic stability and resilience. These provide the necessary environment to protect investments and sustain economic activity. I then examined Uganda's current development financing architecture. Particularly, I assessed how well it matches our development needs and whether its institutions & instruments are appropriate. The performance of our development finance system depends largely on the efficiency of its intermediation mechanisms. 1.Tax administration provides non-debt resources for public capital expenditure; 2.Commercial banks intermediate short-term deposits into commercial credit; 3.Pension schemes and life insurance funds convert long-term contractual savings into durable productive assets; 4.Capital markets provide secondary liquidity & risk-pricing for equity and debt securities; and 5.Development finance institutions absorb early-stage risks that private markets cannot manage efficiently. Achieving our Ten-Fold Growth targets requires a financing framework capable of delivering capital at sufficient scale and duration while preserving macroeconomic stability. The good news is that Uganda already has the principal resource channels and institutions needed to finance development, giving us an established foundation for the Ten-Fold Growth ambition. These include: domestic revenues; external funds; household and enterprise savings mobilised through banks, pension schemes, insurers and collective investment schemes; various forms of foreign investment. There is also an elaborate regulatory & institutional framework that includes institutions like: the MoFPED, financial intermediaries, Capital Markets Authority (CMA), Bank of Uganda, Uganda Retirement Benefits Regulatory Authority (URBRA), and Insurance Regulatory Authority (IRA), among others. It also includes a number of Development Finance Institutions like UDB, UDC and MSC. @mofpedU @henrymusasizi1 @AmosLugoloobi @rggoobi @NPA_UG @mukisawinnien @allankayongo1 @ayebare_deborah