KAMPALA, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) -- The Ugandan government has developed an online system for appraising public projects, which is expected to reduce wastage of resources and establish projects' impact on the social economic development.
The finance ministry said the new system is expected to aid formulation, implementation and evaluation of all public projects.
While launching the new system in Kampala on Wednesday, deputy secretary to the treasury Patrick Ocailap said the government has hitherto lost huge sums of money due to poor evaluation and implementation of projects.
"Because of the absence of this online tool, we have been using market prices to come up with project cost evaluations, and the problem with it is that you can over- or underestimate the cost of the project. When the project is undervalued, it means the contractors end up adjusting the quality and in the end we do not get value for money," Ocailap said.
He said the National Parameters and Commodity Specific Conversion Factors system will give decision makers the tools and indicative matrices to measure the benefits, costs and externalities resulting from project implementation.
In 2016, a World Bank study on Uganda's public investment management system revealed a weak appraisal of government projects, which often results in poor project implementation.
James Wokadala, the Commissioner public administration, said the online system will play a critical role in strengthening the project appraisal and overall public investment management system framework.
"Now that the government has entered a big era of public sector investments, we need to effectively measure the degree of success of the choices made using available resources," he said.
