This week, research firm Steadman Group released a report that showed that the business community's confidence in Uganda is higher than that felt than their counterparts in Kenya and Tanzania about their respective economies.

The research also showed that the business confidence in Uganda was not improving at quite the same rate as a year ago.

However, the research was not clear about what was causing this trend, but there were suggestions that the drought and the inadequate policy environment maybe at the heart of the problem.

We should not thump our chests at coming top of this survey, the East African Business Leaders Confidence Index in the region, because previous global surveys, done on a global scale, did not put the region in the top half of achievers.

Rather, we should bench mark ourselves against the best in the world in designing and executing policy that will improve business� confidence of economy.

The fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990 drove home the point that countries are only as strong as their private sectors. The private sector creates jobs and pays the taxes to finance health, education and general infrastructure. The private sector is the only viable mechanism to eradicate poverty.

In Uganda, where more than a-third of the population is living on less than a dollar a day and where only 6,000 of the 35,000 graduates turned out annually can find formal employment, the necessity of supporting the private sector can not be overstated.

And private sector support need not come in the form of monetary handouts.

The private sector, while operating within a political context, needs to be facilitated through clear and transparent laws, zero-corruption, functional utilities and infrastructure among other things. A deficiency in any of these attributes compromises business confidence.

The Government needs to re-focus its strategy on supporting the private sector to go beyond maintaining macro-economic stability and shift its anti-poverty campaign away from sloganeering.