Abstract

Uganda has not grown substantially on the technological platform. For much of the time, we have heavily relied on imported manufactured products, not to mention technologies. Further, technologies in the country are void of post-sixties' developments. In addition, unstandardised manufacture has largely characterised local fabrication. Concepts of specialisation, outsourcing for cost-effectiveness and inter-dependence have eluded the marketplace.

There are however instances of innovation, where products do not benefit from practices of the recent technology explosion, limiting product competitiveness, interchangeability and productivity in general.

Processes are dominated by hand forming, welding, foundry, manually operated machine tools with little production planning and operations management. Consequently, there are numerous instances of very low-level capacity utilisation.

Macro-level planning and guidance have also been nearly absent, with sad instances of replication of manufacturing processes where more efficient large scale ones exist, rendering them useless. Instances of these are to be found particularly in cereal processing. These anomalies will need to be revisited for redress and a low-resource availability forward plan proposed in future.

To read the rest of this, and all our other articles please click here to download the complete September 2004 issue in PDF version.