How presidential candidates plan to create more jobs

Warren Kizza Besigye

(FDC Leap Forward Policy Paper)

The Party Take: Uganda’s population – youthful and culturally diverse - is a demographic window of opportunity with the potential to unleash human ingenuity as a foundation for enterprise and innovations that create decent well-paying jobs and to expand opportunity for every Ugandan man, woman, youth and child.
The Focus: Putting women and young people at the heart of Uganda’s economic transformation — job creation and employment

i. Targeted and systematic women and youth biased programming – this strategy focuses on creating opportunities through ongoing and new programmes. The FDC is committed to dedicate a specific percentage of any opportunities such as funding, jobs, procurement, etc available under any government programme to the benefit of the youth and women.

ii. Decentralisation of economic and industrial development programmes – this will be pursued alongside the “Future Cities Programme” to ensure that such a programme deliberately focuses on creating social and economic infrastructure that enhance the economic participation of women and the youth across the country.

iii. A commitment to allocate a specific percentage of the national budget across all sectors of the economy to development and spending programmes that address the specific needs of women and the youth.
iv Ensuring the promotion of sports, arts and culture as a strategy to raise awareness on the economic value within the women and youth fraternity.
v Encouraging patriotic participation and meaningful inclusion of all male and female youth in the affairs of the State in a way that empowers them to build social capital and progressive social networks.

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni

The Problem: The biggest challenge the youth face today is finding employment. This requires the youth to have skills that are needed in the job market. Our policy, therefore, will be to continue educating the youth and imparting to them the relevant skills that will make them marketable in the job market.
The Score: In actual numbers, over 2.5 million casual, contractual and permanent jobs in the formal and informal sectors were created in the past five years. In order to further enhance job-creation, we will continue to focus on skilling and re-skilling of the working population particularly, the youth.

Job Creation: Investment in transformation of agriculture from subsistence to commercial agriculture will create a market for industrial or manufactured goods, hence, lead to attraction of more investors both local and foreign.
These efforts will create more jobs for Ugandans.
1. Start five more sugar factories.

2. Focus on mineral (processing) in the areas of fertiliser production from phosphates at Tororo, cement production from limestone in Tororo and production of iron and steel in Tororo and Kabale.
3. Promote establishment of mini-industries at zonal or sub-county level.
4. Establish the cement, iron and steel industries, a venture to be spearheaded by the Uganda Development Corporation (UDC).
5. Regulation of expatriates in the sector enabling the contribution to employment in the country.

6. The Directorate of Industrial Training (DIT) will be restructured in order to facilitate the implementation of an Accreditation, Assessment and Certification Programme (AACP). This programme will ensure that Ugandans, especially the youth, attain international standards/qualifications, which will reduce unemployment.
7. Increasing competitiveness and productivity of the youth through capacity building and empowerment for self-employment. Our goal is to support the youth acquire skills that will enable them get jobs.
8. Initiating, strengthening and streamlining all programmes and services to target the youth.
9. Consolidating youth participation in decision-making and governance at various levels.

10.Strengthen and fully implement countrywide the existing youthtargeted programmes such as the Youth Livelihood Programme and Skilling Uganda. The Youth Livelihood Programme will benefit at least 280,000 youth, basing on the first year’s success.
11. Set up internship programme for youth at universities and tertiary institutions to gain experience, which is critical when seeking formal employment.
12. Set up centres for re-tooling graduates so that they can become employable.
13. Consolidate vocational skills training, entrepreneurship and promote decent work for the youth.
14. Enhance capacity of young farmers to engage in market/commercial agriculture.
15. Encourage youth to protect the environment and support their involvement in green business.

John Patrick Amama Mbabazi
Expectation: We expect, in the next five years, such opportunities to have created between 500,000-1,000,000 jobs in the Private Sector. We also expect that within 3 years, we will have created 3.5 million new jobs from the new initiatives.
Expanding economy and greater opportunity expected to create a minimum of 3,500,000 jobs over the next 5 years (private sector)
An industrialized economy creating jobs for skilled labor and accelerating share of competitive goods ‘Made in Uganda’ in Global Markets.
Foreign Companies: Investors shall be encouraged to setup and create manufacturing jobs in Uganda, while encouraging the participation of Ugandan citizens.

A total of 444,160 new jobs will be created at the sub- county level.
Under this arrangement, new jobs will be available to healthcare workers to support the insurance for all health care schemes, the community bank to support agriculture and local economic development initiatives, silos and warehouse receipting, a one-stop center for business, tax and personal registration, community development center, value addition industries, agricultural extension and ultimately, construction of public buildings including staff houses for teachers and other workers.

New Initiatives
1. The Volunteer Graduate Programme that will engage all fresh graduates who wish to join, will support this unique transformative programme.
2. Our government will establish the Uganda National Seed Corporation to supply, regulate and standardise seed in Uganda. We expect through the seed chain from production of foundation seed to actual seed production, marketing and distribution to have created over 5,000 new technical jobs.

3. To guarantee competitive prices and market for agricultural products, government will establish the The Agricultural Commodities Exchange (Public) Company. This will link the owner of produce (cooperatives) and the buyers including importers abroad. This company will create more than 1500 new jobs.
4. The Residential Solar Grid-Tied System will require the installation and maintenance of solar panels for about 180,000 homes. This will create about 2,000 new jobs from the procurement of the panels to their maintenance.
5. By lowering taxes (exempting all businesses from paying VAT on their electricity used as well as the lowering of the VAT rate from 18% to 16%), our government will be encouraging more industries to be set up and more sales and profits. On account of this new measure alone, thousands of new jobs will be created.

Private sector jobs
Our proposed set-up will empower the community to attract more of such services as transport, finance, hotels and restaurants, insurance, energy, telecommunications, ICT, education, leisure centres and increased demand of processed products. This, in effect, will create a higher demand for workers to deliver goods and services to all corners of the country and ultimately attract opportunities for investors both local and foreign.

Prof Venansius Baryamureeba

The Gospel: Without new and better jobs, we run the risk of increasingly divided societies where the poor do not benefit from growth, leading to social discord and instability. Unemployment and lack of social protection are compounded by large informal economies, where workers earn very little or are underemployed.

My plan is to work towards:
1. Allocating at least 6% of the national budget to Trade, Job creation and Industry
2. Setting up a Youth Development Bank to offer low interest loans to youth with extra ordinary start up ideas and small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
3.Working in partnership the private sector to extend financial services and mobile money services to rural areas
4. Promoting the setting up and running of community based Savings, Cooperatives, and Credit Societies (SACCOs)
5. Achieving skilled workforce through improving education sector

6. Promoting business incubation and putting in place a framework to support startups
7. Setting up of venture capital funds to support startups and small businesses
8. Transforming Makerere University Business School (MUBS) into a fully fledged University in 2016 to among others coordinate and oversee the provision of business education to (owners of) small and medium enterprises and support business incubation and development among the youth (groups) across the country
9. Favorable regulation environment and reforming the tax system to support new players in job creation

10. Steering more students into technical and vocational institutions to promote skills development
11. Providing technical support to the informal sector with the aim of enabling them formalize their businesses
12. Helping small businesses to tap into regional markets
13. Creating a national jobs database to help monitor employment levels
14. Putting in place a research and development fund to support (new) businesses
15. Promoting and supporting the ICT services sector

16.Promoting and supporting Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) to create at least one million jobs in BPO sector for Ugandans in the first two (2) years in office
17. Promoting all types of tourism supported by the Ugandan laws as way of creating more jobs for Ugandans and also contributing to national earnings. The government shall upgrade the Uganda Hotel and Tourism Institute to provide core human resources needed in the tourism sector.

18. Developing and promoting sports as a business at local, regional and national levels by providing support to the sports clubs and teams, and developing and maintaining sports facilities across the country
19. Providing incentives to labour intensive companies and those that offer apprenticeship to enable graduates acquire work experience
20. Lowering taxes in labour intensive sectors and reducing regulation to make hiring less expensive.

Strategies to put our Nation’s women and youth to work

(i) Establish and facilitate public partnership programmes that enable a smooth transition from school to the world of work and investments that create employment transition training centres for out of school youth with specific emphasis to female youth.
(ii) Promoting a uniform approach to women and youth development programmes by all agencies of the state, the civil society and the private sector.

(iii) Adoption of policies that support interventions aimed at creating new and well-paying jobs and promoting economic freedom for women and the youth.
(iv) Establish and support business incubation programmes for women and youth enterprises linked to The National Venture and Innovation Fund.
(v) Develop and nurture partnership between the high capacity incubator, education and training, and innovation institutions for training women and youth in advanced technical and management skills.