Poor policy implementation remains Uganda’s main challenge despite the formation of good laws on paper.
According to Ramathan Ggoobi a Policy Analyst, and lecturer of economics at Makerere University Business School (MUBS), although Uganda has a policy implementation monitoring unit under the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) to ensure that plans and government programs are implemented, both units have remained simply an extension of Uganda’s implementation tragedy.
Ggoobi says Uganda’s policymakers must track overall trends in financial inclusion to provide information on how the landscape of inclusion has changed over the years this includes benchmarking these trends with countries within the region, provide insights that could be utilized both at policy and market levels to further deepen financial inclusion and also to describe the financial service needs of the adult population (i.e. individuals 16 years or older) in Uganda.
The Executive Director of Financial Sector Deepening Uganda Rashmi Pillai said that policymakers in Uganda need to always aim at solving problems of people especially at the lower level than holding hotel workshops which at times yield little or no impact to the common Ugandan.
The digital financial services advisor added that there is no doubt Uganda has wonderful policies on papers but the question of implementation basing of the factor of citizen inclusiveness is still a big challenge in the country at large.
“Uganda has very good policy environment and framework but the challenge is in how it’s executed, forced and whether what is created is a business model with the right incentive for the people at the bottom to participate, becuse if the pricing is too high or the solution is not meeting the common man’s need, even if policies are good, people will not participate,” she said.
She added that banks existed a long time before mobile money but because mobile money was specifically catering for all classes of people, more people participated and welcomed it than the banks. For example, in 2016, many mobile money agencies penetrated in deep rural areas than banks agencies or automated teller machines (ATMs).
“Mobile money became more convenient for people to use becuse it was solving the problem what people had which banks failed. So the question Uganda’s policymakers must be asking themselves. Are we solving peoples’ problems? Are we keeping people in the centre when we think about the business model pricing strategy and how do we reach them? And in case the policy does not work we must find out why it did not work,” she said.
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