It is disheartening to learn that Ugandan milk company, Brookside has laid off 70% of it’s workforce because of Kenya’s refusal to grant us export permits, yet 75% of it’s market is in Kenya.
This is a big weakness if we don’t build capacity to consume our own products to reduce over dependency on foreign markets. What befell our milk school feeding program? Did it hit a snag because of politicization of issues? Feeding on milk guarantees our children health in terms of resilience of their bodies but also boosts their brains in terms of creativity. This also reduces medical expenses when the child is always sickly.
According to my research, our schools are busy grappling with unnecessary expenses due to bandwagon effect. They are spending money to maintain the high expenses of running BUSES.
An average bus costs $290,000 which they are able to nag parents to contribute. But you can’t mobilise Ugx 10,000 per term for a daily cup of milk for our school children. The labour expenses of a bus alone are mind boggling estimated to up to $1500 per bus, and average cost of operating a bus is about $65 per hour, which puts unnecessary pressures on the limited resources of the school.
Modern businesses are using the model of outsourcing, why can’t school proprietors adopt this model since BUSES are not core business? Kindly it would be more prudent to focus on the education needs and health of learners by feeding them on good diet which determines the good future of our learners than investing in buses which you use seldom, probably once in a month when there are school trips or seminars.
In conclusion, Uganda’s GDP and economic growth cannot be increasing when our consumer class is not increasing to support our local industry. Both China and India have 1.4b people and each are adding around 30m people to their consuming class. Personally, I would be impressed when my children inform me that they drunk milk at school.
In the same vein, Uganda’s Real GDP grew an estimated 6.3% in 2022,more than the 5.6% in 2021,this should provide an opportunity to make deliberate efforts in promoting local consumption in order to support our industry.
By drinking milk we shall be preparing a better innovative workforce for the future.
The writer is the Head of Research Office of the National Chairman-Kyambogo.
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