Will Uganda oil find help country’s poorest?

Children from the poorest parts of Uganda could find work and millions of Ugandans could be helped out of poverty through the discovery of vast oil reserves.If managed well, the petrodollars could transform Uganda’s economy, potentially doubling the state's revenues, creating thousands of jobs and help millions out of poverty.

The east African country confirmed it had struck oil, in 2006 after more than 80 yeas of official suspicion.Three years later, as Uganda marks 47 years of independence from Britain, President Yoweri Museveni dreams of industrialising the country."No one, in Uganda or internationally, can now doubt the country's steady and deliberate path to a middle-income country status in the near future," he said, in the capital, Kampala."This is more so with the reasonable discoveries of oil, which, without any doubt, will accelerate our progression to middle-income country status. With the recent discoveries of oil in western Uganda, the country's prospects for domestic revenue and self-reliance in financing public investments and programmes are much brighter today than any other time in the past."

Hundreds of millions of barrels of oil have been confirmed in the Albertine Graben region along Uganda's border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Officials from Tullow Oil, the company leading the investigation, recently revealed that their find alone – 800 million barrels – could yield more than 100,000 barrels of oil per day for anywhere between 15 to 30 years.Since the discovery, Museveni has said that any money from oil, when production eventually starts, will be used to fund government programmes, like energy and transport infrastructure. But Ugandans are now starting to wonder how much will be taken by the mining companies.

A series of United nations reports have shown that Uganda’s poor are getting poorer and the rich richer,  so the fear is that Uganda's oil may end up benefiting a few instead of the masses who desperately need services.Margaret Ayuro, a 40-year-old mother of eight, hopes money from oil will be used to improve health services. At the moment there are no drugs in health centres, but there aren't enough government clinics in the sub-county. Of the six parishes in Katine sub-county, only one has a health centre."The government should use the money to put drugs in our health centres," she told the Guardian newspaper. "And for people with HIV, for instance, why can't government make sure that they get drugs and other forms of support?"