National Forest Plan 2011/12-2021/22.

The National Forest Plan (NFP) is a sector-wide national instrument for managing and utilizing the forestry resources in Uganda. The goal of the plan is “An integrated forest sector that achieves sustainable increases in economic, social and environmental benefits from forests and trees by all the people of Uganda, especially the poor and vulnerable”.
To make forestry more productive and sustainable efforts will focus on restoring and improving ecosystem services derived from sustainably managed forest resources. To this end, efforts will focus on the promotion and intensification of tree growing on farm, restoration and conservation of natural forests including the degraded and deforested forests in wildlife conservation areas and on private and communal lands, conservation of biodiversity, forestry research, education and training including developing and implementing a tree improvement programme, supply of quality tree seed and planting materials including development of a seed certification scheme, forest sector institutional development and coordination.
To reduce poverty the policy will seek to increase economic productivity and employment through forest production, processing and service industries, as well as raising incomes for households through forest-based initiatives. To this end, efforts will focus on developing commercial forest plantations, energy plantations, and community-based out-grower forest plantation schemes around large plantations, promoting farmer field schools and agro-forestry demonstrations, mobilizing conditional grants for forestry management by local governments, establishing the Tree Fund to support tree growing initiatives at local government and community levels, developing diversified income resources (e.g. expanding landscape tourism, botanical gardens, butterfly farming, value addition, etc).
To enable more inclusive forestry systems specific activities will be initiated to build capacity for community based natural resource forest management and collaborative forest management. Efforts will focus on the area of forestry product processing and value addition. Specifically, the activities will promote small and medium capacity sawmills with high recovery rates, improve harvesting and processing practices for higher revenue returns from natural forests, and build the capacity for value addition for processing wood and non-timber forest products.
Further, the policy incorporates a gender- and youth- sensitive design because in Uganda firewood and water for domestic use is usually collected by women and children. Therefore, the Programmes on watershed management and pole & fuelwood plantations will be implemented with close participation of women and school children. Climate change considerations will also be mainstreamed into the forestry policy. This will include: preparation and implementation of the REDD+ strategy, scaling up afforestation and reforestation projects in line with CDM arrangements, and promotion of climate change mitigation and adaptation implementation through public-private partnership arrangement.
Regarding governance, the policy lays down the list of key actors and their responsibilities as well as the monitoring and evaluation indicators. Ministry of Water and Environment / Forestry Sector Support Department is the lead institution regarding the policy implementation.