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Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are being linked to formal financing through lending and enterprise development programmes aimed at helping businesses overcome barriers to growth, with new figures highlighting the role of credit in supporting Uganda’s private sector.

A report titled Report to Society 2025, published by dfcu Bank, shows that the lender financed 6,527 SMEs in 2025, while its foundation facilitated Shs38.08 billion in credit to enterprises, highlighting the role of financial institutions and business support programmes in connecting enterprises to formal financial services.

The figures come amid growing attention to the financing needs of businesses seeking to expand beyond small-scale operations, invest in production, strengthen supply chains and create employment.

For many enterprises, accessing finance is only one part of the challenge. Business development skills, market connections and partnerships can also determine whether firms can use credit effectively to grow and become more resilient.

‘Uganda’s economic growth depends not only on helping businesses start, but also on enabling promising enterprises to become stronger, more productive and more resilient,’ Dr James Ssemwanga, chairperson of dfcu Foundation, said. ‘Many businesses have the potential to grow, create jobs and support wider value chains, yet they need more than capital alone. They need the skills, partnerships, market connections and financial services that can help them move to the next stage.’

The foundation, which transitioned from a Business Development Centre in 2024, has supported more than 4,000 enterprises since 2018 and reached over 80,000 beneficiaries, according to the report.

At the launch event at Serena Hotel Kampala on Wednesday, Dr Winifred Mary Tarinyeba Kiryabwire, Chairperson of dfcu Bank said: ‘We are sharing these results not simply to celebrate our progress, but to give our stakeholders a basis on which to assess our contribution and challenge us to do more.’

Linking businesses to finance

The Shs38.08 billion in credit facilitated through the foundation represents one of the report’s key indicators of its role in connecting enterprises to formal financial services. The report also identifies the financing needs of businesses described as the ‘missing middle’: enterprises that have moved beyond survival but still require appropriate financing, business development services and market access to scale. Such businesses may need support that combines finance with technical expertise and commercial connections, rather than lending alone.

The foundation’s approach includes working with SMEs, aggregators, processors, commercial farms, manufacturers and other enterprises linked through production and distribution networks.

These connections matter because the growth of an individual business can have implications for suppliers, producers, workers and other firms within the same value chain.

Women entrepreneurs are another group highlighted in the report, which says the bank’s Women in Business programme has supported more than 80,000 women entrepreneurs.

The initiative forms part of efforts to expand women’s participation in economic activity through enterprise development and access to financial services.

The foundation also reports that the majority of its more than 80,000 beneficiaries since 2018 have been women and young people. It aims to support more than 100,000 additional beneficiaries between 2025 and 2030 through enterprise development, value-chain connections and market-oriented partnerships.

Accountability in banking

Charles M. Mudiwa, managing director and chief executive officer of dfcu Bank, said the publication of the report was intended to account for the resources and trust placed in the institution by customers, investors and the wider public.

‘Uganda’s understanding of sustainability did not begin with the introduction of environmental, social and governance frameworks. Our communities have long understood the importance of protecting the natural world, preserving what matters and ensuring that future generations can benefit from what has been entrusted to them,’ Mr Mudiwa said.

‘That same principle applies to banking. Our customers and stakeholders entrust us with their money, their businesses and their confidence. We therefore have a responsibility to account for how we use those resources and what they help us achieve,’ he said.

He said the report brought together the institution’s impact stories and key figures, providing stakeholders with a view of its contribution beyond conventional banking services.

The report also documents community health and environmental initiatives, illustrating how the institution’s activities extend beyond business financing. It says community health interventions reached more than 25,000 Ugandans, while a three-year partnership with Rotary Uganda involved a Shs1 billion commitment towards preventive healthcare through medical camps.

The interventions include consultations, diagnostic tests, medicines, dental and eye care, health education and referrals. The report lists outreaches in Jinja, Mbuya, Mutungo, Kasenyi Landing Site and Kamwokya.

On environmental initiatives, the bank reported that 62,000 trees were planted or distributed in 2025. The report acknowledges the importance of distinguishing between trees planted and those distributed, as well as tracking survival rates and maintenance arrangements to establish longer-term environmental outcomes.

There is a need for an honest recognition that Uganda’s overarching economic policy strategy is defective, thus a return to the drawing board. I will explain. But first, a caveat is in order.

I am not an economist! My reflections and impressions are shaped by my field of academic training and professional specialisation – the study of politics. Thus, I come at this from the lens of national economic strategy as a function of politics and power play.

It wasn’t very long that our 1986 rulers fully embraced the articles of faith of neoliberalism and what was then dubbed the ‘Washington Consensus’, an agenda propagated by Western financial institutions and buttressed especially by the treasury of the United States of America.

Despite a supposed leftist, Marxist ideological background that would mean a sceptical attitude towards faith in free markets, and even after for a while toying with alternatives to standard market practices, President Museveni and his NRM government dramatically imbibed the neoliberal agenda.

At its core, it was an unmodulated faith in the magic of the free market to deliver a poor country like Uganda to the promised land of material prosperity. Except that, not in 1986 and not in 2026, there is no compelling evidence that an economically poor, socially and technologically backward country anywhere in the world ever attained economic turnaround through the magic of the market.

No doubt, the market is a very powerful tool that drives economic activity and shapes individual or firm incentives, but on their own, markets, however free, have never transformed societies. There is something more, in fact, many ingredients, that go into a grand strategy of national economic transformation.

A great deal of the problem is to conflate markets with capitalism, and to assume that unfettered capitalist pursuit of profit under conditions of unregulated markets means there will be economic growth and prosperity for all. Not quite.

In the case of Uganda, as I argued last week, under the neoliberal regime of economics over the last three decades, we got some modest economic growth but not much to write home about in attaining a turnaround.

In the main, we are still stuck in the colonially created structure as a raw material exporting economy, and an importer of expensive finished goods we are unable to produce domestically precisely because we lack the skills and sophistication to do so.

There has been a smattering of industrial parks here and there, the production of tiles, textiles and marble in Kapeka and Karamoja, but not much significant progress in real industrialisation as to move the needle in expanding the overall size of our economy.

The policy choices taken in 1989/1990 have proved sticky and hard to reverse despite recent haphazard attempts at returning to the basics, including reviving the national airliner and recapitalising the national development bank.

The cavalier disposal of Uganda Commercial Bank was arguably the biggest blunder of all. It handed the nation’s countrywide retail and small business banking needs to foreign capitalist interests that are unlikely to have a long-term vested interest in Uganda’s national development ambitions.

There is big rhetorical talk of a $500b economy in, God knows, how long from now and the quest for integrating all Ugandans in the formal economy. But the rulers must make hard choices and bold decisions, the first of which is to divest from the purveyors of free market fundamentalism.

President Museveni has been on record conceding that the only thing he regrets was to have listened to external actors. Unless Uganda, and indeed all of Africa, reasserts policy sovereignty and pursues policies and programmes that reflect local thinking and appreciation of what we want as a people, big talk and lofty ideas will lead nowhere.

There are lessons from elsewhere to look to. For a while now, a popular phrase in development economics is the notion of ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ to denote a distinct approach the Chinese took to their breathtaking march from a pitifully poor country only a few decades ago to a global economic and military superpower of our times.

Before China, the so-called Asian Tigers (Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) pulled off their own route to transformation from third- to first-world nations, doing so by not listening to some received wisdom from Western experts or the policy dictates of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In fact, quite the contrary, they pulled off their economic ‘miracle’ by defying those Western financial bullies.

If Uganda under the NRM has the revolutionary credentials its supporters trumpet, undertaking an autonomous and homegrown economic strategy would be the definitive reflection. This hasn’t been. Thus, the ramblings by a one Ian Otega, suggesting the NRM and Museveni are comparable to China and Mao Zedong and that there is a Deng Xiaoping in the offing, are either crass intellectual dishonesty or blithely ignorance.

The National Drug Authority (NDA) and security officials say they are investigating how drugs believed to have been stolen from Uganda’s health facilities are ending up in Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) camps in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and South Sudan.

Both NDA Spokesperson Mr Abiaz Rwamiri and Luweero Resident District Commissioner (RDC), Ms Miriam Nalubega Sseguya, disclosed that some government health workers who have since been interdicted for drug theft from government facilities confessed to having trafficked them to Congo.

”Currently, we have drug thefts in Luweero District and as I talk, we have identified health workers who are found in connivance of stealing drugs from Luweero hospital and they were trafficking them to Congo to reach ADF camps. This is very bad.” Ms Nalubega said.

Adding that, “The health workers identified so far colluded to steal drugs from Luweero Hospital and traffic them to Congo, where they reached Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) camps.”

Without disclosing how the accused health workers connected with the rebels and transported the drugs in question, Ms Nalubega called the theft both a public health risk and a security threat, urging in-charges to act as whistleblowers and asking why tips about drug theft keep coming from people who do not work in the facilities.

She appealed to all health workers and Ugandans to help security agencies catch the culprits.

According to the authorities, the stolen drugs include 12,000 doses of antiretrovirals (ARVs) for managing Aids, antibiotics and some medical supplies worth Shs 50 million.

The RDC and NDA spokesperson made the revelation during a stakeholder engagement at Luweero District headquarters on October 21, following the arrest of Marion Namugenyi, a midwife at the facility, alongside her two brothers and a security guard, Titus Kura, over drug theft.

Ms Namugenyi has since appeared before court and was remanded at Luzira Prison until November 13 on criminal-related charges.

Mr Rwamwiri added that intelligence shows that some of the stolen drugs end up in the hands of rebels, while some are sold as animal feed.

”They steal them and take them onto a black market. And where do these drugs end? Our intelligence shows most of them are smuggled to southern Sudan, to Congo. And we know what is happening in eastern Congo. Some of them are actually ending up in the hands of rebels. So we are feeding and keeping rebels healthy to come and terrorise us.” He said.

Adding that, ”and that’s why for me I regard anyone involved in the drug crime to be a terrorist. One, you’re denying drugs to sick people who need them. It means you’re sentencing them to death. And now there is also a security issue that you’re giving drugs, you’re aiding, you know, terrorism, rebel activities, by keeping rebels accessing government drugs at a given price. So it’s, something has to be done. We leave that to the district.”

The ADF started as a rebel force in Uganda but has been based in the forests of neighbouring Congo since the late 1990s, and is recognised by Islamic State as an affiliate.

Congo’s army and Ugandan forces have pursued operations against the ADF, but the group’s attacks continue.

Luweero District Health Officer, Dr Innocent Nkonwa, said nine health workers in the district have since been interdicted for drug theft and criminal-related charges, their names already forwarded to the Public Service for their dismissal from service.

As the investigation continues, Mr Abiaz said medicines worth Shs25 billion have been stolen from public health facilities in the last three years, noting that the government loses between 30 and 50 percent of drugs it procures and supplies.

“Where does government get money to supply these drugs? It is our taxes,” he said. Citing that the drugs most often targeted are ARVs, malaria medicines and other essential medicines.

No drugs

Ms Salim Zimula, a resident of Nalongo village in Butuntumula Sub-county, said patients regularly go to government health facilities in the area and are told there are no drugs and are instead sent to private pharmacies, where they pay far more than they can afford.

Taming drug theft

The district has introduced a central pharmacy model. All medicines in a facility are dispensed from a single point.

When a clinician prescribes, the patient or caretaker must collect the drugs from the central pharmacy.

Heads of department submit requisitions only on Mondays and Thursdays, and the medicines are issued to the respective departments. Other days are reserved for emergency orders.

Dr Nkonwa said this limits the quantities held by individual health workers, reduces contact between staff and the store, and gives officials time to follow up and balance books against stock.

Staff at the pharmacy update dispensing logs and the electronic systems. Some facilities use Clinic Master and others e-Registry, and the district wants both to feed into the dispensing logs.

At lower-level facilities without pharmacists or dispensers, nurses and other clinicians will be formally assigned to run the dispensing window.

I recently read (though I didn’t watch) the video of a guy who got an AI bot to attend a job interview on his behalf. This was hilarious because the interview itself was conducted by the recruiting company’s AI bot. Time for employers to sit up and pay attention, they have been making job seekers suffer for too long. By the way, does anyone still roam around with brown envelopes, dropping physical CVs? It seems so outdated now.

If sending AI bots to represent yourself is the way of the future, I am not complaining because believe me, I need it. First off, if I can have a personalised AI bot, the first thing it will do for me is make those frustrating yet necessary phone calls that end up with you being on hold forever. Calls to the bank, the doctor’s office, etc. I will name my AI bot Sposobny (Google says it means ‘capable’ in Russian). Try to wrap your tongue around that, ha ha ha!

As the technology continues to improve and become more affordable, I will turn Sposobny into a life-like hologram that can carry out certain in-person functions on my behalf.

Let’s see how Sposobny will do with refereeing my children’s endless, senseless, headache-inducing squabbles, to begin with.

I can just see her weighing the facts of each case and delivering an unbiased judgment, in a terrifying Russian accent that will ensure her ruling is accepted.

Sposy, my pet name for her, will, in her holographic form, also attend those awful outdoor festivals my husband is always dragging me to. No more standing in crowded parks with people smoking things that smell like emissions from Satan’s chamber of doom. No more burning in the sun or losing all feeling in my fingers or toes, depending on the season. Liberation is here!

But wait, what if my children, who are ten times more tech-savvy than I could ever hope to be, start doing the same thing to me? Sending bots to listen to my endless lectures, for example? Errr, this AI thing could be tricky.

Cheers to tech that makes life easier!