Opposition MPs train on programme based budgeting

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Desirous of having a team that can influence business on the Floor of the House, the Leader of the Opposition (LOP), Mathias Mpuuga is rolling out trainings intended to improve the capacity of Opposition Members of Parliament to exercise their oversight role better.

The first training was conducted on Thursday, 10 March 2022 by the National Planning Authority (NPA) at Parliament’s Conference Hall. It focused on the new programme based budgeting and its use.

The government began transitioning from output-based budgeting to programme based budgeting in 2013 in a bid to improve the link between budgeting and national strategic objectives.

“We have a gap in appreciating the migration from output to programme based budgeting. As a team that is supposed to exercise oversight including budgeting and appropriation, we need to understand how this is done,” Mpuuga said, adding out of the 109 Opposition MPs, over 80 are new members. Unfortunately, our roles are very unforgiving; you have to guide, direct, check and influence. You can only check what you know, and hold accountable what you know.

He said that the training is part of the plan for the implementation of the Opposition’s legislative agenda.

“We intend to deliberately capacitate our MPs, we have various knowledge streams but the work we do here is so aligned that there are things you must understand,” the LOP said.

“We are moving as the Opposition into policy clusters that we agreed upon in our retreat [last month] as a way of following up on government programmes and influencing business in the House,” he added.

The NPA Executive Director, Dr Joseph Muvawala, explained to the legislators that unlike the output-based budgeting where budgets were developed to reflect the relationship between funding and expected outputs, under the new approach, resources are allocated in alignment with the national development plans.

“We are moving away from reporting inputs, we should not be coming to Parliament to report to you how many classrooms we have constructed, we should be coming to this Parliament to report how much learning is taking place in the classrooms,” Dr Muvawala said.

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SOURCE: UGANDA PARLIAMENT MEDIA