President Museveni invites Algerian investors to Uganda
President Yoweri Museveni has called on investors from Algeria to explore value addition of raw materials in Uganda.
While addressing a team of investors under the Council for Algerian Economic Renewal-Conseil du renouveau économique algérien (CREA) led by their President Mr. Kamel Moula in Algiers, Museveni urged Algerian investors and businessmen to take advantage of Uganda’s profitability by building and locating production facilities in the country, which has got all the required raw materials that just need value addition.
“The big battle we have now and we want you to help us is value addition like the coffee for instance. The problem here is that when we export unprocessed coffee, we get a little like two dollars a kilo and after processing it we get like 50 dollars. So, this is massive robbery,” Museveni said, adding that with 9 million bags of coffee per year, Uganda ranks number four globally in coffee production after Brazil, Vietnam, and Colombia.
The President, who was concluding his three-day state visit in the North African country, told the Algerian business community that despite the global value of the coffee business in the world being 460 billion dollars, the coffee-producing countries share only 25 billion dollars out of which Africa gets only 4.8 billion dollars.
Uganda is the biggest coffee producer, pockets only 900 million dollars of that. “It is a big scandal and a battle we’re engaged in,” Museveni said. He added that Value addition in coffee is among the 10 key priority areas of investment where Algerian investors working together with Uganda’s Ministry of Trade should focus their energies.
President Museveni invites Algerian investors to Uganda
The other areas include; the textile industry, automobiles industry, chocolate production using cocoa, footwear production, animal feeds production, pharmaceutical starch production, fruit processing, human medicine, vaccine production, and tea processing.
“We have got about 30 factories of tea, but we need more tea buyers but also investing in tea processing. Because there are some areas where we have got the green leaf but less processing capacity. Those are some areas that are not yet covered,” Museveni added.
Museveni who briefed the investors about the economic history of Uganda said the problem of no value addition and the continued export of unprocessed products had not only made Africa lose money but also jobs hence underdevelopment.
“When you hear that there’s insecurity in Africa and that African youth are running away from going to Europe through the Mediterranean Sea, this is the reason. Africa is the one donating money and jobs to the rest of the world,” the President noted, adding that Uganda is on the right path of waking up people to go from a traditional non-money to a money economy, producing a lot of raw materials which only need value addition.
For his part, Kamel Moula informed Museveni that the private sector is playing a key role in the Algerian economy with plenty of family-based private multinational companies leading in the domestic market and ready to share the knowledge and the know-how with Uganda.
“We share the same vision because Africa has been relying on the western world. Our president has instructed companies to send 150 representatives to your country to interact with the business community in Uganda to identify the goods we need from each other so that we target our objectives,” Kamel said.
Museveni welcomed them to Uganda and commended their strategy of private companies working with the government.
The meeting was attended by the Minister for Trade, Industry, and Cooperatives Francis Mwebesa, the Minister of State for Trade Harriet Ntabazi, the Permanent secretary Geraldine Ssali, Uganda’s Ambassador to Algeria JC Alintuma Nsambu, among other officials.
President Museveni invites Algerian investors to Uganda
