MUK introduces private public partnerships course

Kampala. Ministry of Finance in partnership with Makerere University has launched a Private Public Partnerships course at the College of Engineering, Art and Design to equip Ugandans with knowledge concerning the new avenue of infrastructural development.

The course will focus on how to improve Private Public Partnerships (PPP) in the country, an avenue that government adopted to collaborate with the private sector into building large infrastructural projects.

Speaking at the launch of the new course on its pilot stage, the state minister for Investment, Mr Gabriel Ajedra, said the course had been created to build capacity and fill the knowledge gap concerning private public partnerships in Uganda.

“We as Ministry of Finance do not have enough money to budget for infrastructure because these are very costly and we now think it is time to venture into PPPs. People that know about them are very few so we need to empower them so that they understand it,” he said.

According to Mr Ajedra, private public partnerships are a different mode of delivering services that are off budget lines, with the private sector collaborating with government to inject money in infrastructure, with the aim of collecting a profit after a given period of time.

Mr Kenneth Ssemwogerere, the the PPP course coordinator at the department of Architecture, said components of a PPP will be broken down into six short courses where a certificate of training will be issued.

A certificate in these principles will be a prerequisite for other PPP courses.

Benefiting the country: The inability to predict the future, according to Mr Ajedra, requires knowledgeable people with proven capacity to negotiate projects that will benefit the country. While explaining, he referenced Bujagali dam whose heightened interest rates continue to weigh down end-user power tariff currently.

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