Africa-Press – Uganda. District Commercial Officers (DC0) have decried inadequate funding towards government projects noting that this is affecting their performance.
Mr Godfrey Odoki, the Mwoya DC0 said many government projects have stalled because of poor funding by the government towards their offices.
“We have the capacity, knowledge and skills but we lack facilitation, at the moment we get a grant of Shs3m per quarter and it is very small. And we are not as independent as other departments,” he said during the closure of the Export Launchpad Uganda Project in Mukono on Friday.
Mr Lawrence Oketcho, the director of the Uganda Export Promotion Board said the trained commercial officers are going back to brief their technical teams and political leaders to work as a team to boost quality products for export.
“We have taken them through export readiness training which is very important for people who participate in exports,” he said.
Ms Noreen Kamoti, the senior trade information executive at Uganda Export Promotion Board said the purpose of the training is to build the capacity of commercial officers to promote the export trade in the country.
“We found Commercial Officers as a good conduit for the transfer of knowledge and skills to SMEs. Our quantities are small, quality is not good because of lack the coordination, we want to produce according to the demand not to what they think will sell,” she said.
Finance Ministry Permanent Secretary, Mr Ramathan Ggoobi, in his speech, said that Uganda’s exports are characterized by low value-added primary products which attract low prices in the international markets and therefore negatively impact the trade balance as a country.
“Uganda’s trade balance has widened by 4 per cent from USD 4.7bn in the financial year 2020/2021 to USD 4.8bn in the financial year 2021/22, indicating 12 per cent reduction from USD 9.9bn to USD 8.7bn over the same period,” he said, adding that the third NDP aims to raise the share of manufactured exports to total exports from 12.3 per cent in the financial year 2017/18 to 19.8 per cent in the financial year 2024/25.
The training supported by international Islamic trade corporations of Saudi Arabia as well as the trade facilitation office of Canada was aimed at making the DCOs understand the international environment as well as the import regulations of different countries.
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