Nearly half of Uganda’s population is still hovering just over the poverty line, with limited access to basic necessities as the country grapples with failure to find the right mix of financing to create wealth.

Last month, anti-poverty think tanks revealed that 46 per cent of the population — translating into 17 million Ugandans — are likely to slip back into poverty because they have not come into the mainstream of financing instruments, namely aid or official development assistance, microfinance, trade, foreign direct investment and remittances, that governments rely on to fight poverty.

Development Initiatives, Africa Hub and Development Research and Training convened a round table of major donors led by the World Bank, microfinance institutions and policy makers in Kampala to address the dangers of vulnerability that Uganda still faces.

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“It is more about looking at how these instruments can work together rather than independently to cut out poverty in the country,” said Karen Rono, senior analyst at Development Initiatives.

Uganda has received $19 billion in aid since the 1960s, but this has not ended poverty because a lot of it did not target sectors like agriculture, where the majority of Ugandans are employed. As such, the poor are left out of economic activities, without access to finances and social protection programmes that would cushion them from falling deeper into poverty.

Uganda’s population, growing at an alarming rate of 3.4 per cent per year, is another poverty trap given that 50 per cent of the country’s development budget is still funded by donors, according to World Bank economist Racheal Sebudde.

The proportion of Ugandans below the poverty line currently stands at 19.7 per cent according to the 2012/13 Uganda National Household Survey. This is an improvement on the 2009 data that showed the country’s poverty levels at 24.5 per cent, and in 2004 at 38 per cent, while in 1992/3, 56.4 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line.

This means the population, now standing at 37 million, puts a lot of pressure on already scarce resources that would otherwise be invested in education to provide skills to Ugandans.