The Uganda Investment Authority (UIA) will next week hold a conference in Kampala for the business community to among other issues, showcase the investment opportunities that exist in Uganda.
According to a press release the conference will be held under the theme: ‘Your investment is our business’, and in the course of the conference UIA will share information on investment potentials, tax incentive regimes and networking. The agency will also highlight the role of private sector investment in Uganda.
Further, the UIA will showcase how the One-Stop Center established to ease doing business in Uganda works. Also, officials from the Uganda Registration Services Bureau (URSB), Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) and, the Ministries of Lands and Internal Affairs will carry out a ‘Business Clinic’ as one of the means of taking services nearer to the business community.
Meanwhile, apart from investors, UIA says it has targeted politicians and religious leaders to attend the conference. In the past President Yoweri Museveni has blamed some politicians and religious leaders for frustrating investors, especially those who want land to set up factories.
UIA is a lead agency in investment promotion tasked with making Uganda the best investment destination in the EAC region and Africa as a whole. Currently, Uganda faces competition for investors from its bigger neighbours Kenya and Tanzania, with the former commissioning the faster Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) weeks ago.
Officials at the agency say holding such conferences is one of the strategies used to attract investors, especially foreign ones who, with their dollars who can help revamp the struggling economy, whose GDP this year the World Bank has estimated at 3.5 per cent due to the effects of the prolonged drought that affected agricultural production.
While presenting the 2017/18 national budget last week, the Finance Minister Matia Kasaija said that the GDP will end the year at 3.9 as people continue to harvest crops.
