🟥 Background to the budget speech

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT |  Minister of Finance, Henry Musasizi will this afternoon present Uganda’s sh84.3 trillion shillings budget for the 2026/27 financial year .

The budget comes at a time when policymakers are positioning mineral resources, especially oil and gas, as a major driver of growth, industrial development, and future export earnings. For the first time in Uganda’s history, the government is expecting direct revenue from oil production.

The budget framework paper projects 1.44 trillion shillings in oil and gas revenues during the coming financial year, marking the beginning of Uganda’s transition from an oil-investing nation to an oil-producing one.

Here are the expected highlights of his speech:

✅Financial year 2026/27 will see the country witness many milestones of significant and historic proportion. The first and foremost is the imminent confirmation in March,2027 of Uganda’s graduation from the category of Least Developed Countries (LDC). This confirmation comes two generations after the country’s independence in 1962.

✅This graduation is not merely a bureaucratic milestone; it is a powerful validation of national resilience that will lower sovereign risk, unlock premium international investment capital, and position the country as a highly competitive, self-determined economic engine on the African Continent.

✅Within the same period, the country’s official transition into an oil producer will come to pass with the scheduled delivery of First Oil in the first half of FY2026/27. This milestone follows 17 years of patient but focused multi-sectoral visioning, planning and execution across different arms of government and by multiple players in the economy.

✅Consistent with Government’s commitment to inclusive economic growth, FY2026/27 will reinforce last mile delivery of vital public services under the Parish Development Model.

✅FY2026/27 Budget has been designed to accelerate Uganda’s transition from incremental growth to productivity driven transformation.

✅Building on this momentum, the Government is targeting to reduce the proportion of households relying on the subsistence economy to 28.5 percent by FY2026/27 from the current 33 percent. This transition is being driven by commercialization of agriculture, scaling of MSMEs and structural expansion of the Parish Development Model (PDM) among other initiatives.