KYANKWANZI — The National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) is poised to radically restructure its operations and infrastructure development following a high-level leadership retreat aimed at curing chronic inefficiencies in Uganda’s public sector.
NWSC Managing Director Dr. Silver Mugisha revealed Wednesday that insights gained from the weeklong Public Sector Institutions Leadership Retreat at the National Leadership Institute (NALI) in Kyankwanzi will directly shape how the utility delivers water and sewerage services.
The retreat, running under the theme “From Governance to Impact,” brings together statutory board chairpersons and chief executives to address systemic bottlenecks, performance lapses, and institutional friction that routinely stall public service delivery.
“NWSC’s participation reflects its commitment to continuous improvement, institutional governance, and alignment with national development goals,” Dr. Mugisha said, noting that the ultimate objective is to offer taxpayers better value for money.
According to Dr. Mugisha, the high-stakes training aims to inject a culture of “disciplined execution” and rigid accountability into the leadership of state enterprises.
Participants have been tasked with identifying core structural contradictions that cripple public service delivery, addressing lingering lapses in performance management, and committing to aggressive strategies that yield measurable, trackable institutional results.
The curriculum, facilitated by cabinet ministers and policy experts, also tackles modern board practices, institutional climate-setting, and navigating a volatile macroeconomic landscape.
The strategic emphasis on disciplined execution comes at a critical time for NWSC. While the utility has successfully built massive production assets—such as the landmark Katosi Water Treatment Plant—it faces public pressure over downstream distribution gaps that leave some areas water-stressed.
To remedy this, NWSC is currently rolling out its Package 2B initiative—a massive Shs 400 billion (€93 million) network expansion and re-zoning project designed to stabilize water supply across the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area.
Dr. Mugisha noted that the retreat’s emphasis on execution perfectly aligns with NWSC’s current shift from merely building systems to aggressively delivering water to consumers’ taps.
“NWSC is deliberately shifting its focus from adding production to expanding distribution so that treated water already sitting in the system reaches households currently going without,” Dr. Mugisha stated, highlighting how governance insights will be applied directly to ongoing pipeline works.
The push for public sector reform comes as Uganda prepares to transition to its fourth National Development Plan (NDP IV). Central to the discussions is the country’s ambitious Tenfold Growth Strategy, an economic blueprint targeting an aggressive expansion of Uganda’s GDP from approximately $50 billion in 2023 to $500 billion by 2040.
Economic experts note that achieving this tenfold leap will heavily rely on utility giants like NWSC modernizing infrastructure swiftly and efficiently to support industrialization and rapid urbanization.
The retreat is jointly organized by the Civil Service College Uganda and the Public Sector Chairpersons’ Forum. The forum was established under the Office of the President to create a unified platform for strategic oversight among state-owned enterprises.
This gathering follows a similar, cabinet-level retreat held at NALI, where ministers and permanent secretaries met to diagnose the root causes of civil service underperformance.
