Makerere University
Kampala. Ministry of Finance in
partnership with Makerere University has launched a Private Public
Partnerships course at the College of Engineering, Art and Design to
equip Ugandans with knowledge concerning the new avenue of
infrastructural development.
The course will focus on
how to improve Private Public Partnerships (PPP) in the country, an
avenue that government adopted to collaborate with the private sector
into building large infrastructural projects.
Speaking
at the launch of the new course on its pilot stage, the state minister
for Investment, Mr Gabriel Ajedra, said the course had been created to
build capacity and fill the knowledge gap concerning private public
partnerships in Uganda.
“We as Ministry of Finance do
not have enough money to budget for infrastructure because these are
very costly and we now think it is time to venture into PPPs. People
that know about them are very few so we need to empower them so that
they understand it,” he said.
According to Mr Ajedra,
private public partnerships are a different mode of delivering services
that are off budget lines, with the private sector collaborating with
government to inject money in infrastructure, with the aim of collecting
a profit after a given period of time.
Mr Kenneth
Ssemwogerere, the the PPP course coordinator at the department of
Architecture, said components of a PPP will be broken down into six
short courses where a certificate of training will be issued.
A certificate in these principles will be a prerequisite for other PPP courses.
Benefiting the country:
The inability to predict the future, according to Mr Ajedra, requires
knowledgeable people with proven capacity to negotiate projects that
will benefit the country. While explaining, he referenced Bujagali dam
whose heightened interest rates continue to weigh down end-user power
tariff currently.
editorial@ug.nationmedia.com
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