MoFPED was created by the 1995 Constitution of Uganda, at the time, there were two departments: a Ministry of Finance (MoF) and a Ministry of Planning and Economic Development (MPED). By 1995, the government launched the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) in order to prioritise poverty eradication. was formulated after a long consultative process with a wide range of stakeholders. The process was spearheaded by MPED.

In 1998, the MoF and MPED were merged into the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (MoFPED), which the World Bank noted was "critical in establishing fiscal discipline, while building links between policy formulation, planning, and budgeting". The merger led to an emphasis on coordinating the budget process and introducing output-oriented budgeting within a medium-term expenditure framework. Many of these early reforms had a "cutting-edge dimension"; Uganda was one of the first countries in Africa to adopt a semi-autonomous revenue agency (the Uganda Revenue Authority) as well as introduce medium-term budgeting. Implementation, however, had a lot of room for improvement.

In 2010, MoFPED started receiving detailed project-by-project reports on budget allocations and quarterly expenditures from local governments through a digital budget reporting tool. However, local stakeholders, including elected representatives whose mandate it is to monitor service provision, are largely unaware of this information. In order to solve this issue, MoFPED partnered with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), and Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment (ACODE) in 2014 to launch a Budget Transparency Initiative to make department, project-, and location-specific budget information available to politicians, opinion leaders, and the public as well as mobilize them to monitor and provide feedback on the spending and services provided by government institutions.

MoFPED sub-agencies

MoFPED supervises the following government agencies:

• Insurance Regulatory Authority of Uganda (IRAU)
• Uganda National Council of Science and Technology (UNCST)
• The Microfinance Support Centre Limited
• Tax Appeals Tribunal (TAT)
• National Enterprise Corporation (NEC)
• Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Authority (PPDA)
• Uganda Investment Authority (UIA)
• Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC)
• The Population Secretariat
• Departed Asians Property Custodian Board (DAPCB)
• Non-Performing Assets Recovery Trust
• Non-Performing Assets Recovery Tribunal

Autonomous government agencies

The ministry works closely with the following autonomous government agencies:

• Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS)
• Uganda Revenue Authority (URA)
• Bank of Uganda (BOU)
• Capital Markets Authority of Uganda (CMA)
• National Planning Authority (NPA)
• Uganda Property Holding (UPHL)
• Uganda Development Bank Limited (UDBL)

Government Of Uganda