Cabinet has approved the country’s long-awaited National Physical Development Plan (NPDP) for 2022/40 to give the physical aspect of planning development a more central role within government policy-making.

The drafters of NPDP say it will help to coordinate and align national projects in urbanization, infrastructure, transportation, and wealth-creating sectors.

The proposed method of achieving the above objective is to ensure that ministries, departments and agencies of Government, whose activities are the main determinants of the physical planning of the country, agree to, and jointly carry out, their projects according to the Plan.

Lands minister Judith Nabakooba tweeted that the Cabinet meeting of November 14 that was chaired by Vice President Jessica Alupo passed this plan.

“I thank the Cabinet and all stakeholders for the support. A big launch will be organised. A new era for smarter urban centres is here. Long live President Yoweri Museveni,” she said.

She told New Vision on Tuesday that Cabinet made some amendments to the final draft of NPDP but the principle remained because it’s a framework that guides planning in the country.

“That (NPDP 2022/40) will be out in two weeks because the Cabinet included other things,” she said.

Background

The drafters say the NPDP comes from a background of its modern physical planning systems, which originated in the construction of trading and administrative centres during the pre-independence period.

It is cited in the National Land Use, Urban and other Policies and is required by the Physical Planning Act 2010. It has parallels with physical and spatial frameworks which have been prepared by an increasing number of countries and national and transnational bodies.

They also say the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe put it simply and clearly that “Spatial planning is concerned with the problem of coordination or integration of the spatial dimension of sectoral policies through a territorially-based strategy”.

They note that the NPDP gives a strategy to resolve the conflicting sectoral pressures on the uses of land, a finite resource of the territory of Uganda, as the population grows, and the country modernizes.

It works with the two overall critical variables, the Population and Urbanization Projections and the National Land Use Balance Sheet.

It provides a basis for integrating the physical and spatial with the economic and social issues of national development planning. Its core elements are the pattern of human settlements, the land uses and natural resources for economic activity and the infrastructure networks which connect and service them.

“In order to facilitate the smooth integration of the physical and spatial, with the social and economic aspects of development planning, the NPDP has been organised around the “Pillars” of Uganda’s Vision 2040 and the sequence of five-year National Development Plans which are used to govern the country. The NPDP limits itself to the physical components of national development planning, and avails itself as a tool for the consideration of the “spatial’ alongside the other economic and social aspects of development planning,” the drafters say.

The NPDP uses population and urbanisation growth rate projections for Uganda’s primate city Kampala, its principal secondary cities and towns, and its “Rurban” and rural areas.

It is based on the projection that the urban population is likely to double from 20% to 40% of the total Uganda population by 2040: Uganda is starting from a base of being less urbanized than many other countries.

In terms of land use, the NPDP predicts that the growing populations, even with larger scale, higher yielding and higher productivity farming methods, will put immense pressure on the country’s grasslands, forests, protected areas and seasonal wetlands.

This is a pressure which is already very evident in the current illegal development of wetlands, the destruction of forests, and the conflicts between pastoralists and crop farmers, throughout the country.