Gulu City launches first green physical development plan in Uganda

Gulu, (UG): The Gulu City Council has officially launched its new Physical Development plan with emphasis on Greening Uganda’s Urbanisation and Industrialisation, making it the first ever green physical development plan in the country.

Dr Ronald McGill, the Project Team Leader for the European Union-funded project on Greening Uganda’s Urbanization and Industrialization project, says the three-year initiative came out with a Physical Development Plan which has services of digitized maps (Global Identification System) to show every level of spatial information such as land use, environmental factors, and roads among others. He said the PDP also provides links to land ownership and use.

While speaking during the launch of the plan on Tuesday, September 12, Ms Dagmar Zwebe the Country Representative of GGGI said their goal is to develop the new cities in Uganda to become climate resilient against climate change occurrence in the future.

“If you don’t plan and budget well, anything else will be chaos. And now that you have the plan, you need to follow the plan to be climate resilient with the changing climate in terms of bigger storms, unexpected storms, and longer periods of drought” Dagmar said.

In this project, Dagmar noted that GGGI worked together with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to design the project for some of the new cities and industrial zones to be ready for the next step and more importantly to check financing to ensure the implementation process becomes a reality as well as guiding finance allocation in the right direction.

Uganda became a member of GGGI in 2019, to reiterate its commitment towards this cooperation by committing to pursue Uganda’s long-term sustainable growth objectives and climate action leading to increased prosperity and a more resilient future.

The Global Green Growth Institute is a treaty-based international, inter-governmental organisation dedicated to supporting and promoting strong, inclusive and sustainable economic growth in developing countries and emerging economies.

In this commitment to Uganda’s new cities, GGGI is embarking on addressing its strategic outcomes including reduced greenhouse gas emissions, creation of green jobs, and increased access to sustainable services (clean affordable energy, improved sanitation, sustainable waste management, and public transport). Others include improved air quality, adequate maintenance of natural capital and enhanced adaption to climate change.

Ms Dagmar emphasized that the new cities such as Gulu should learn from Kampala by planning ahead of time to avoid scenarios whereby whenever it rains, power, Internet, and phones go off like in Kampala.

Amanda Ngabirano, the Chairperson National Physical Planning Board argued the technocrats and politicians to work together in marketing the PDP in order to gain the support of the populace.

“A country that does not have a PDP will not have good Gross Domestic Product compared to the country that has,” she said adding that this is the same with the cities in terms of revenue collections.

“Don’t let this effort go to waste. Let us make a legacy through the support of GGGI. We have observed that Gulu City has unity in leadership, regarding this PDP” Ms Ngabirano emphasized, advising a clear path of communication to avoid creating grounds for conflict that interferes with development.

Apart from unity among technocrats and politicians, Jackie Kemigisha Kiiza, the Commissioner Ministry of Local Government called upon the authorities to own the plan. “We need to own the implementation of this PDP. The council should prioritise resource allocation to implement it. So we need to venture into the detailed planning, disseminate the plan to the general public and work together as a team to implement it,” she emphasized.

Godfrey Kisekka Bwebukya, Gulu City Clerk, promised to work independently in line with the legal framework without bending to any negative political interest.

According to the City Clerk, the PDP was developed inclusively with the support of the local leaders, technocrats and the general public and the implementation should not be a challenge except for some issues of surrounding land tenure ownership in some areas that they promised to work as a team during the implementation.

Gulu City PDP became the second physical development plan launched by GGGI. The first one was Jinja City’s physical development plan. On September 14th, the Institute will launch the physical development plan in Arua City and later in Lira City.