Reviewing Uganda’s 2017 National Export Action Plan

• Uganda’s Export Promotion Action Plan prioritises export-oriented growth to attain middle income status by 2020.
• In April 2017, the Uganda National Planning Authority (NPA) invited the IGC to review the Export Promotion Action Plan.
• According to the NPA, the IGC’s recommendations informed not only the Export Action Plan, but a number of other policy papers
• This initial engagement led to an agreement for wider collaboration and knowledge sharing between the NPA and the IGC.

In April 2017, representatives from the Uganda National Planning Authority (NPA) requested IGC Uganda to review a policy paper on Nation Export Promotion for presentation to the Economic Cabinet. This provided an opportunity for the IGC to draw on its existing research on improving Uganda’s export policy focus and offer evidence-based inputs for the action plan and wider development strategy.

Drawing on its network of expert trade economists, the IGC Uganda team provided detailed comments on the Action Plan from a practical policy perspective. IGC recommendations were incorporated, and resulted in the modification the final policy document.

The NPA indicated that the comments were extremely useful in finalising the Export Action Plan, but also helped shape NPA’s engagement in a number of other policy areas. For instance, the IGC’s comments on reducing transport costs informed the mid-term review of the National Development Plan, and continue to inform other NPA papers, such as the Certificate of Compliance (CoC) assessment report. Furthermore, IGC comments on price incentives within the Export Action Plan will inform Uganda’s engagement within the East African Community (EAC)’s negotiations. In a third example, IGC comments on strengthening the regulatory environment for agribusiness, in particular on the reform of seed law and certification, not only informed the Export Action Plan, but also another NPA policy paper entitled Towards Zero Hunger.

As a direct result of this engagement between the IGC and the NPA, an ongoing agreement for collaboration and knowledge sharing of the IGC’s research was reached. As part of this, NPA have now circulated compendiums of IGC’s research projects to its in-house sector experts. The NPA requested that IGC Uganda regularly inform NPA on new policy-related outputs in order to generate an open culture of knowledge sharing, and to inform NPA strategic planning.