Planning of National Transport Infrastructure
In the Islamic Countries
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evaluation is both top down from sector and sub-sector and bottom up from the project level.
The output from the evaluation will help government to decide on the preparation of the next
transport plan.
3.3.8. Conclusions
Based on the above analyses, it can be concluded that Uganda has made very progress in NTI
planning. For each planning aspect, the following conclusions are drawn:
 Political and legislation: A draft policy made in 2014 is being updated in 2018. Legislation
reforming the sector especially roads has been made.
The National Transport Master Plan did not have any legal force other than cabinet
approval so that compliance with it was weak. The NTMP is a product of IFI intervention
and may not have been produced endogenously. The NTMP enabled IFIs to contextualise
their investments.
 Institutional and organizational: The MoWT is responsible for producing national
transport plans. The weakness in the NTMP is the lack of capacity to implement it,
consequently less than 50% of the its 70 specific objectives have been addressed, according
to the on-going mid term evaluation.
Autonomous organisations produce sub-sectoral plans for road, rail and air. Councils
produce plans for local roads and public transport. Transport planning agencies are not
multidisciplinary and cross sectoral, and this causes problems in preparing plans that meet
their multivarious objectives. Generally, transport planning agencies are autonomous
authorities such as UNRA, URC and the Kampala City Council. Importantly no transport
planning agencies have adequate authority to raise funds for investments, which is done
through the Ministry of Finance. There is very little private funding of transport
investments. Plans have not been aligned to fiscal space.
 Technical: There appears to be no systematic basis for prioritizing projects. There is no
national traffic model. Traffic forecasts are made for each project and are normally too high.
 Procedural and financing: Transport planning is highly centralised, but transport
planning agencies do not really have adequate capacity to prepare plans relying totally on
outsourcing to consultants. Academia was not involved in the transport planning process,
which is a waste of intellectual resources. All plan making is outsourced to consultants.
Companies that do feasibility studies also do the design and this is conflict of interest. 55%
of the funding comes from IFIs who have a positive influence on planning processes. The
transport sector has the largest allocation of public expenditure.
 Content of NTI Plan : The NTMP was output based, that is to say reporting on the number
of km of roads, number bridges and interchanges that should be built, the plan was not
interested in outcomes in terms of meeting demand, level of service, reduction in accidents
and improvement in human development and this is a weakness.
The questionnaire response indicates a large measure of positiveness, the current study
does not entirely concur with the levels attributed and this substantiated with the findings
of this study and also the mid-term evaluation of its NTMP being carried out in 2018.
In summary the current transport plan if Uganda is contemporary and so is mostly relevant
and meets to needs of the nation.