THE UGANDA PARISH MODEL AND THE TRICKLE DOWN EFFECT

Last week the finance ministry were biting their tongues in parliament to justify the near sh500b they had provided in the budget for the parish model.

The parish model of development, a pledge in the NRM manifesto, is as the title suggests the intention to have the parish - the LC II, as the unit of delivering development to the people. The NRM has decided that in their drive to shift the population, mainly the rural population, away from subsistence to commercial production, they need to oversee the process from closer than the sub-county level.

According to the NRM proposal this will be driven by the Parish Development Committee (PDC) which will be led by the parish chief and peopled by the LCI and II chairpersons, a member from the local cooperative society, elders, religious and cultural leaders.

Initially they will be charged with removing production and productivity constraints by helping manage logistics, dissemination of research findings, providing high yielding inputs and helping with pest control.

"The devil is in the detail, but one can see an attempt to transmit more determinedly the macroeconomic growth that the country has enjoyed over the last three decades to the rural areas. This is long overdue, but one wonders whether there aren’t analogous structures in the government that can do the same? We leave that for another day.

When the NRM came to power in 1986 the GDP – the sum total of economic activity, stood at $4b. On the ground the reality was worse than the number indicated, nothing worked – there were more potholes than tarmac on our roads, electricity was an urban myth and lining up for sugar, paraffin and bar soap was an improvement on commodity shortages; the formal economy was in terminal decline and more than 50 percent of our export receipts and tax revenues came from the export of coffee.

Today the economy stands at $35b, not much to write home about given per capita income is less than $1,000 but shows that the economy has grown more than eight fold or about three percent compounded annually over the period.

Unfortunately, this growth has only been concentrated in the urban areas. By some estimations Kampala account for 22.5 percent of GDP with only five percent of the national population, that means the per capita GDP of our capital city is about $3,500. And what is the capita GDP of Uganda? About $800.

And why should we be surprised, the concentration of infrastructure and services in Kampala by geographical area or per person is so much higher than any other place in the country. Hence the economic disparities we see in our country.

One can blame Uganda’s fast population growth rate – the number of Ugandans has tripled since 1986, but more importantly if there are economic inequalities are widening it’s an indictment on the government. The government has either failed to facilitate economic growth, which is far from true in Uganda or if the economy has been growing the government has failed to facilitate the equitable distribution of this growth...

Equitable distribution does not mean we will all equally benefit, but everyone will have a fair chance at improving their living standards and be able to take advantage of available opportunities to do so.

However, without government intervention to create market access, educate and keep the population healthy, ensure peace and security, the economic growth will be concentrated in a few hands.

Government does this by fast creating an enabling environment for business to thrive, tax these economic actors and then by providing security, infrastructure and social services enable the rest of the population to become productive and hopefully wealthy citizens.

Enter the parish model of development as proposed by the government. In principle this is an attempt – not the first and most definitely not the last, by government to facilitate the trickle-down effect. That if we teach our small producers to fish rather than give them the fish, the country will be better from the effort and the billions will have been put to good use.

Since seven in ten Ugandans derive their livelihoods from agriculture, which has not grown as much as construction, services or industry, this is a laudable initiative.

Especially as part of increasing productivity it will facilitate agricultural extension and irrigation, the two interventions with the highest rates of return in agriculture...

If executed well, this can be a real game changer. It is a scandal even criminal that the agriculture sector has the lowest rates of growth over the years and yet the majority of Ugandans derive a living from it. By increasing production and productivity of our farms, not only will the economy grow even faster but the good growth numbers we keep drooling over, will make sense for more and more people.