Officials from the Gambian Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs have kickstarted their benchmarking visit in Uganda aimed at understanding how the latter manages her public investments.
Led by the ministry's Permanent Secretary, Mr Jobe Baboucarr, the officials say the valuable lessons they have already started to pick in Uganda will help them resurrect their economy which direly needs reforms.
"Gambia has been embarking on a lot of reforms in various aspects, economic reform, judicial reform, institutional reforms in general, and one of the areas that we have been working on is also public investment management. We started working on that, but in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund, we sought advice in terms of which country to actually visit to see exactly how and what they have done so far in that area. A couple of countries were actually highlighted. The country that we ended up choosing was Uganda, and I'm happy to say that we are glad that we chose Uganda for this assignment, because the intention was only on public investment management, but we have gone beyond that because we have been able to get more information on other things," Mr Baboucarr said.
He added: "Right now, we have gaps in project conceptualisation, evaluation, project implementation, monitoring and evaluation, these are all areas that need urgent reforms and what we have seen in Uganda, how the process is actually taken from step by step, is what actually impressed us."
Gambia, with a $3 billion GDP, he said, is aiming at ensuring that each project which receives government funding is felt by the citizens through job creation and poverty eradication so as to advance the economy which is already growing at six percent.
"And it is important that we learn from each other, because the environment is the same, we are confronted with the same challenges and we have countries in Africa that are well ahead, so there's no point in going outside of Africa to learn from things that we can learn from our own people," he said.
After attending a meeting of the development committee, where they were taken through how Uganda handles her public investments, the team visited Makerere University School of Economics which houses the Public Investment Management Centre of Excellence (PIM-CoE) where they interacted with officials about the entire investment agenda.
Speaking at the meeting on Friday August 28, Prof Edward Bbaale, the Head of PIM-CoE, noted that the centre is key in ensuring that government invests in projects that bring returns immediately rather than waiting for years.
"At Makerere University, PIM-CoE, we ensure that we build the capacity of government officials, undertake strategic research to ensure that by the time the government chooses an investment, it is viable and sustainable," he said.
Speaking during the meeting, Mr Baboucarr said the interaction will not only help them implement what they have seen, but also ensure that they forge partnership with Uganda.
"There are so many things that we believe that we could definitely partner with Uganda in advancing economic development, not only between our two countries, but in Africa as a whole. This is just the initial visit of a series of visits that I believe Uganda will actually embark on in the coming months and years to come," he said.
