Poverty campaign aims to increase income and access to basic services

REDUCING mass poverty is a fundamental aim of the Ugandan government. The progress made over the last five years has been described by U.S. international development agency USAID as “admirable”, but there is still a long way to go.
Despite the impressive economic growth of the last ten years, around 35 percent of the population live below the poverty line, lacking basic needs such as food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education and transport. The vast majority of the poor live in rural areas, many of them in the north of the country.

USAID attributes the successes so far to “an outstanding set of policies and programs”, resulting from a genuine consultative process involving all sectors of Ugandan society and the donor community.
The foundation of the government’s campaign against poverty is the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) launched in 1997 with the aim of enabling the majority of Ugandans to have access to basic social services, and improve on their household incomes within 20 years.
The action plan has four main goals: fast and sustainable economic growth and structural transformation, good governance and security, increased ability of the poor to raise their incomes and increased quality of life for the poor.

“The strategies embedded in the PEAP are aimed at wiping out mass poverty in Uganda by 2017 by reducing the incidence of absolute poverty to 10 percent,” says Gerald Ssendaula, Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development.
The Ministry keeps a close watch to ensure that PEAP policies are being carried out effectively through its Poverty Monitoring and Analysis Unit.
An important part of the government’s strategy is the Plan for the Modernization of Agriculture, which aims to move Uganda from subsistence farming to commercial farming. “We have chosen to eradicate poverty through modernizing agriculture because most of the people are involved in agriculture,” says Dr. Kisamba Mugerwa, Minister of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries.

Given the limitations of Uganda’s domestic revenue, spending on poverty-reducing activities is heavily dependent on outside help. Last year, Uganda became one of the first countries to benefit from the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction Support Credit (PRSC) program, designed to assist low-income countries.
Funds provided under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, sponsored by the IMF and the World Bank, are spent on education, health, water and sanitation, farm-to-market roads, agricultural extension and micro-finance by the Poverty Action Fund (PAF).

The U.S. remains one of Uganda's strongest development partners with annual grant aid disbursements exceeding US$50m towards poverty eradication and the improvement of social services.
In May, Mr. Ssendaula signed a set of agreements along with U.S. Ambassador Martin Brennan and USAID representative Dawn Liberi in Kampala under which the U.S. government will give Uganda $290m towards poverty eradication over the next six years.