Uganda unable to find investors for power plant

02/09/2010 by JR Russell

BusinessWeek reports today that Uganda has decided it has no choice but to finance the building of a new hydropower plant themselves when efforts to attract investors failed.

The Karuma hydropower plant will be a 500 watt plant as opposed to the 200 watt plant that was planned before Norway’s Norpak Power Ltd dropped out of the project in 2008.

Only five percent of the Ugandan population are connected to the national grid, and electricity is prohibitively expensive for most.

Unfortunately for Uganda, they will have to come up with the USD $1.3 billion.

Recently, Heritage Oil decided to pull operations from Uganda as well, selling its shares of the Lake Albert oil blocks to Irish company, Tullow Oil.

Uganda’s Minister of State for Investment, Aston Kajara, has previously expressed concern that foreign companies may be dissuaded from investing in Uganda while they are inventing new ways to violate human rights with the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.