He said Uganda has a lot of potential in the agricultural sector which needs to be utilized to enrich Uganda and also improve the food baskets of other countries world wide.

“You can also look at other investment opportunities in the country, in other sectors such as Agro-processing. Uganda would like to liberate man kind from bad foods which they eat. We have got very good foods which are not modified by inorganic fertilizers”, Museveni told sheik Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, the chairman Warid Telecom, after launching the operations of Uganda’s 4th telecommunications operator at the commonwealth resort of Munyonyo, a suburb of Kampala city.

Sheik Nahayan  is also chairman of the Abu Dhabi Group based in the United Arab Emirates, with diverse interests in banking, insurance, real estate, and telecommunications.

“I therefore invite through you, your highness, other middle eastern and gulf companies to come and invest not only in infra-structure the way you have done, but also in value addition to our mineral products as we produce a wide variety of minerals”, Musevini said, adding:

“Our foods include fibres, diary products, fish and vegetable oil are all very healthy, so we invite investors in these sectors to come and join us”, stressed the Ugandan leader.

He continued to say that, Uganda has an investor (Sameer Group) in the diary product, which has performed very well in the local market and will soon start exporting its diary products worldwide.

“Very soon our milk will be able to reach different destinations on the globe. And we would like the same to happen to the agricultural products of which we have in plenty”, he added.

He pointed out that government’s objective of inviting people to invest in the Agro- processing sector is, to add value to the raw agricultural products so as to harvest more foreign exchange from the world market.

“When we export material like raw coffee we get about 1/5 of the value of the final price on the world market. By just adding value, the economy of Uganda can grow by 10% in a few years,” he said adding that “we are therefore going to concentrate on attracting companies that are going to add value to our spectrum of raw materials”.

Talking of the edge that Uganda has over some countries in terms of investment opportunities, the president said, the United States and Europe gave Uganda zero tariff access to their markets and no quotas under a legislation of arrangement known as the African Growth and opportunity Act (AGOA) and Economic Partnership Agreement (EPAs).

So with this kind of arrangement in place, Uganda is indeed a better destination for investment as these two economic giants(USA and EU) have already paved and assured the way to do so.

Keywords: uganda business investment