President Museveni has thanked Standard Chartered Bank for supporting imfrastructure development in the country.
Museveni, swhile meeting top officials from the bank at State House Entebbe said the bank should now concentrate on financing wealth creation because it will expand production.
“If you make a road or Standard Gauge Railway but do not have enough to transport, then you will still have problems and you can even be overtaken by social issues like unemployment. So there should be a step on the infrastructure side but also a step on the wealth creation side,” he said.
“On the wealth creation side, there are the four sectors which include commercial agriculture which we are handling ourselves, but there’s manufacturing now where we have a lot of raw materials, but they are not transformed into finished products. We need more in that area so that when there’s infrastructure, there are ready goods to move along on it. So, if you do the infrastructure and also do some manufacturing using our raw materials, that will quickly expand the economy.”
He informed the delegation that Uganda is now targeting an economy of $ 500 billion in the near future.
“The raw materials, the energy as well as some of the infrastructures are already there but what is not there adequately is the manufacturing and the dedicated Ugandans are there but they don’t have capital,” he said.
“In the projects you are talking about, I think the immediate ones should be the Umeme buy-out, SGR and irrigation because we want to stabilise agriculture and Industries.”
Faruq Muhammad, the Managing Director and Global Head of Structured Export Finance at Standard Chartered Bank thanked the president for creating an enabling environment that has allowed them to finance various projects in the country.
“Uganda is a very good market for us. My first visit to Uganda was when we were financing Warid Telecom (now Airtel) which had just received an operational licence. As an international institution, we have a lot of tools and products and we appreciate the opportunity to use them as a joint benefit for the government and us partners,” Muhammad said.
“Now we are looking at some key projects like the transmission lines, Kidepo Road Projects and some of the oil roads.”
Maria Kiwanuka, the board chairperson of Standard Chartered Bank Uganda said the bank has been a good cadre of economic development in the country.
“There are quite a number of projects that we have executed here in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development. We have worked very well with the government of Uganda in several areas especially the infrastructure development,” she said.
