Uganda Development Corporation
| UDC | |
| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | 1952 |
| Jurisdiction | Government of Uganda |
| Headquarters | Kampala, Uganda |
| Agency executives |
|
| Parent agency | Uganda Ministry of Trade, Industry & Cooperatives |
| Website | Homepage |
The Uganda Development Corporation (UDC) is an agency of the government of Uganda. It promotes and facilitates the industrial and economic development of Uganda. Formed in 1952, it had some success in promoting local industrial development and was swelled with the addition of newly nationalised industries in the early 1970s. These, however, proved too much for the corporation, and it went into a slow decline before being completely phased out in 1998. The organisation was reconstituted with similar aims in 2008.
The UDC was created by the British colonial administration in 1952 to "facilitate the industrial and economic development of Uganda". Under the Uganda Development Corporation Act 1952, the objective of UDC was to "promote and assist in the financing, management or establishment of— new undertakings; schemes for the better organisation and modernisation of and the more efficient carrying out of any undertaking; and the conduct of research into the industrial and mineral potentialities of Uganda." It was given a starting equity of £5 million, which it quickly grew.
At the time of Ugandan independence in 1962, a report commissioned by the outgoing British administration and incoming government and overseen by the World Bank commented that "the UDC has energetically explored a wide range of industrial possibilities" among a backdrop of economic pessimism over coffee prices, which Uganda was (and remains) heavily reliant on. By this time, the UDC was already one of the two largest public corporations of the government, a "principal instrument in the country's development program." The same report was complimentary of the UDC's performance, describing it as "presently the most important entrepreneur in Uganda and a successful one in this most difficult field of fostering development." By 1965, it had turned a post-tax profit every year since its creation (albeit with some help from tariff protection) and employed (including subsidiaries) over 18,000 people, engaged in projects as diverse as cement and cotton. State control of the economy was on the increase. The UDC, which had previously provided startup equity before selling out to private investors, was now given the legal right to retain majority shareholding in companies it had been instrumental in setting up, and with the 1970 Nakivubo Pronouncement, which allowed for stakes up to 60 percent.
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