Uganda develops online appraisal system for public projects

KAMPALA, Feb. 17 — The Ugandan government has developed an online
system for appraising public projects, which is expected to reduce wastage
of resources and establish projects’ impact on the social economic
development.

The finance ministry said the new system is expected to aid formulation,
implementation and evaluation of all public projects. While launching the
new system in Kampala on Wednesday, deputy secretary to the treasury
Patrick Ocailap said the government has hitherto lost huge sums of money
due to poor evaluation and implementation of projects. “Because of the
absence of this online tool, we have been using market prices to come up
with project cost evaluations, and the problem with it is that you can
over- or underestimate the cost of the project. When the project is
undervalued, it means the contractors end up adjusting the quality and in
the end we do not get value for money,” Ocailap said. He said the National
Parameters and Commodity Specific Conversion Factors system will give
decision makers the tools and indicative matrices to measure the benefits,
costs and externalities resulting from project implementation.

In 2016, a World Bank study on Uganda’s public investment management system
revealed a weak appraisal of government projects, which often results in
poor project implementation. James Wokadala, the Commissioner public
administration, said the online system will play a critical role in
strengthening the project appraisal and overall public investment
management system framework. “Now that the government has entered a big
era of public sector investments, we need to effectively measure the degree
of success of the choices made using available resources,” he said. – XINHUA