Bank of Uganda (BoU) has launched a five year strategic plan aimed at strengthening its ability to stabilise the economy and sound financial system to support investments in the country.
According to the Deputy Governor of Bank of Uganda Michael Atingi-Ego, the new strategic plan includes a progressive approach to emerging issues such as Central Bank digital currencies, climatic risk, and sustainability of financial systems, big data and artificial intelligence.
The strategic plan was launched at a time of significant disruption, difficulty, and great uncertainty in the domestic and global economy. Inflation has shot up globally mainly due to supply chain disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic containment measures that were exacerbated by the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict this year.
“Fortunately, strategic plans are living documents that anticipate multiple future paths, design responses to the dominant anticipated paths, and flexibly adjust to the evolving environment while maintaining a sharp focus on the ultimate goals,” he said.
Atingi-Ego added; “Our strategic plan stands on solid rock not least because it has resulted from the participation and input of the Bank’s diverse stakeholders who see our future from multiple perspectives in a dynamic environment.”
The BoU’s Organisational Change Management Policy (April 2021) provides for proactive strategic foresight, analysis, and where necessary, the timely revision of the strategic plan to incorporate relevant innovations and emerging issues. These change management strategies will enable the strategy document to remain nimble and relevant in the constantly changing business environment.
“Our envisioned future is ‘To be a centre of excellence in upholding macroeconomic stability’ through a positive approach to stakeholder engagement; price and financial sector stability; financial stewardship; operational excellence; and employee excellence. For each of these strategic focus areas, the intended results aim to continuously create and deliver value to our stakeholders,” he said.
The strategic focus areas were developed through a collaborative and participatory assessment of the business environment involving external and internal stakeholders. To optimize value creation for stakeholders, the strategic plan is aligned with our country’s Vision 2040, National Development Plan III (NDP III), and the Financial Sector Development Strategy (FSDS), among others.
“Our refined mission is ‘To promote price stability and a sound financial system in support of socio-economic transformation in Uganda’. Accordingly, we will always secure the traditional public goods of price stability, financial system soundness and resilience, as well as financial system and payments systems development.”
Under the new plan, BoU intends to pursue new goals such as the promotion of a sustainable financial system in which the supervised financial institutions will be encouraged to observe the minimum environment, social and governance standards by extending their business models beyond the narrow creation of shareholder value to include the sustainability concerns and their impact on society.
To maintain fidelity to its mandate in an evolving world, the SP 2022 – 2027 includes a progressive approach to emerging issues such as central bank digital currencies; sustainability of the financial system; climatic risk; integrated reporting; big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning; cybersecurity; as well as the adoption of technology in supervision and regulation (SupTech and RegTech), among others.
The new strategic plan includes initiatives to enhance the BoU’s strategy management maturity such as leadership, alignment, and performance management, among others that were identified in the end-term evaluation of the previous strategic plan (SP2017-2022).
