CSO Position Paper on the Status of Domestic Resource Mobilization in the East African Community (EAC)
Water Governance Institute (WGI) is a member of the Tax Justice Alliance Uganda (TJAU) Civil Society Coalition/ Network that does work on tax justice in Uganda, East Africa and the continent as a whole through the Africa Tax Justice Network (ATJAN). TJAU Alliance routinely engages Government and other stakeholders on matters of Tax. We observed that in the EAC there is a growing recognition of domestically mobilized revenue as a sustainable source of financing of the countries’ development priorities, but the EAC countries are failing to leverage that resource effectively, often failing to fully meet their financing requirements. Consequently, they resort to external sources; including loans, grants and aid to finance development and social programs as well as compete for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in a “race to the bottom” scenario. While there are efforts to harmonize domestic tax mobilization and administration in the EAC, there is still a lot that needs to be done to realize the harmonization aspiration. For example, the current implementation of the domestic tax harmonisation policy in the EAC focuses on the principles of the policy and not the rates, yet the rates are the final ingredients needed to actualize the policy.
The following is a link to the detailed CSO Position Paper on the Status of Domestic Resource Mobilization in the East African Community (EAC) to which WGI participated in its preparation. https://seatiniuganda.org/download/cso-position-paper-on-the-status-of-domestic-resource-mobilization-in-the-east-african-community/