Last week, we attended the Economic Growth Forum. Well, Uganda has never suffered from a shortage of ideas. Our challenge has too often been converting good ideas into sustained economic outcomes.
The Tenfold Growth Strategy, therefore, represents more than an economic target; it is a national execution challenge: a determination to transform Uganda from a largely factor-driven economy into a productive, export-oriented, technology-enabled and value-adding economy.
The ambition is audacious: grow the economy from roughly $53 billion to $500 billion by 2040, effectively doubling GDP every five years. The strategy targets higher savings and investment, rapid export growth, stronger human and physical capital and a dramatic increase in value-added exports.
Uganda has reason for optimism. Real GDP grew by 6.3 percent in financial year 2024/2025, while agriculture, industry and services all contributed to expansion. Yet the World Bank cautions that too much economic activity remains concentrated in low-productivity and climate-vulnerable agriculture and informal employment. The next leap must, therefore, be qualitative, not merely quantitative.
The ATMS architecture: Agro-industrialisation, Tourism, Mineral-based industrial development including oil and gas, and Science, Technology and Innovation is, therefore, exactly the right direction. But ATMS must become more than a policy acronym. It must become Uganda’s economic operating system.
As the Secretary to the Treasury, Dr Ramathan Ggoobi rightly observed, Uganda has developed many good policies, but the missing policy is often the policy on implementation, the machinery that ensures that an approved policy becomes a funded programme, a completed project, a functioning factory, an export contract or a measurable improvement in household income.
Government technocrats deserve considerable appreciation for the quality of policy architecture already developed. The task now is to match that intellectual capital with an equally powerful execution culture.
This requires a national delivery compact.
The government must crowd in, not crowd out, private capital through public-private partnerships, blended finance, development finance, patient capital, targeted tax incentives where genuine strategic public-interest projects require risk mitigation.
The tax base must expand alongside the economy. Uganda cannot finance a$500 billion economy on a narrow formal tax base. Digitalisation, e-invoicing, formalisation, better property and land information, customs intelligence and AI-enabled compliance can broaden the base without simply increasing the burden on compliant taxpayers.
In a nutshell, the Tenfold Strategy is achievable, but only if policy becomes execution, capital becomes productive investment, agriculture becomes industry, commodities become brands, technology becomes productivity, and growth becomes prosperity.
The economic question before Uganda is no longer whether we have the potential. It is whether we have the discipline to execute it. The next fifteen years must, therefore, be Uganda’s era of execution.
The author, Mr Michael Jjingo is the general manager commercial banking at Centenary Bank.
