Recently, Uganda’s President Museveni held a meeting with Chinese Hunan Province Governor Xu Dazhe at state house, Entebbe. This meeting was intended to go through the different investment opportunities and resources Uganda has that China can tap into for growth and employment of many Ugandans.
Museveni defined Uganda as blessed land with many opportunities in agro-processing, mining and industrialization sectors.
Uganda also produces a lot of coffee, fruits, sim-sim and cassava, if industries are set up to process these and add value into complete food products, it would boost exportation thus increase foreign earnings and also create employment to thousands of Ugandans.
“The potential for cooperation between China and Uganda is big. What we want is a reliable market for agro-products. Once we have the demand, we can produce whatever is needed,” he said.
With focus on Coffee, President Museveni said increased growth has been witnessed from 2.8 million bags to 5 million bags, more efforts put forward to even produce 20 million bags with time.
He called upon Chinese investors to establish factories that make machine tools needed by other factories across the region.
According to Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) statistics, national coffee production increased by 1.3 million bags in 2017 compared to 2016. Uganda is second largest coffee producer after Ethiopia in Africa.
On mining, the President said that government was in the process of modernizing its mineral laboratory so as to supply the local industries.
“We used to produce copper here during the British times but it was processed only up to 94% and the copper ingots would not be used in our transformers. We would end up exporting copper ingots and importing more processed copper to come back to our factories,” he said.
Governor Dazhe said that like Uganda, Hunan Province is very strong in agriculture and presents many opportunities for cooperation with Uganda in that sector in order to achieve a win-win result for the two countries.
