Building on a new five-year strategic plan, the Directorate of HR and Administration is shifting from a traditional support role to a strategic enabler for the entire institution. With settled leadership, a refreshed governance framework, and clear performance targets, DHRA is doubling down on staff development, welfare, and process efficiency. URBRA’s HR Officer, Sylvester Bagenda, shared his reflections with Lydia Mirembe, highlighting what the Directorate has achieved and what lies ahead. Excerpts below

How is URBRA positioned to meet the demands of the sector, especially in relation to improving supervisory efficiency and effectiveness?

Following the roll out of URBRA’s new five-year Strategic Plan (2025/26-2029/30), URBRA’s HR Directorate renewed its commitment to efficient and effective service delivery. Under URBRA’s strategic objective to improve supervisory efficiency and effectiveness, the HR Directorate is expected to sharpen process management and people development. Essentially the directorate shifts from being a back office to a strategic enabler. With a clear strategic plan, settled leadership, a new Board of Directors URBRA is well positioned to drive sector-wide ambitions.

How is URBRA streamlining its internal processes to enhance operational efficiency?

Efficiency doesn’t make headlines. But it’s the engine under everything else. This past year, the focus has been on making our processes less dependent on individual memory and manual workarounds. The most visible change is eDocS which is our digital document management system. Before, people were chasing paperwork, sending follow-up emails, never quite sure where an approval was stuck. Now everything lives on one platform. You can see where a document is, who’s holding it, how long it’s been sitting. That changes how work moves through the office. For a regulatory body where accuracy and turnaround matter, that’s not a small thing.

Staff who feel looked after tend to stay and in a specialised environment like ours, experienced people who leave take a lot with them. With that in mind, we have kept investing in staff welfare. We also reinstated our staff retirement benefits scheme as a proper, member-run arrangement.

Within the Directorate, we’ve rebuilt performance plans to directly mirror URBRA’s Strategic Plan leading up to 2030. We are not planning from habit; rather we are mapping each person’s work to what the institution has committed to deliver. Connecting daily work to strategy is one of those quiet improvements that sounds simple but hard to do consistently.

How is URBRA contributing to sector capacity development?

HR’s contribution here is indirect but foundational. We don’t supervise schemes directly. But we build the capability of the people who do. And what those people are being asked to do has changed significantly. A decade ago, URBRA was overseeing a simpler sector. Today, assets under management have crossed UGX 35 trillion up from UGX 12 trillion when URBRA was set up. Products are more complex, schemes are more sophisticated, and the informal sector is finally a serious policy conversation. With the exponential growth of the sector, expectations on URBRA have also grown. Overseeing the ever-growing sector requires people with different skills. So, our skills agenda isn’t about ticking training boxes. We’re putting in structured professional development and certification programmes to build skills deliberately and not waiting for it to happen on its own. When one of our officers sits across from a fund manager or trustee, the quality of conversation is a direct reflection of how much we’ve invested in skills building. We want those conversations to be substantive real technical exchanges, not just compliance check-ins. The CEO has been clear: URBRA needs to move from a policing mindset to genuine partnership with the sector. That’s not about going easy on anyone. It’s about recognising that schemes and trustees do better when they understand the rules and trust the people enforcing them. Building staff who can hold that kind of relationship – technically grounded but not adversarial – is a key HR job.

What key lessons has the Directorate learnt in FY 2025/26?

A few things became clearer this year.

• Leadership matters more than we sometimes admit. Two years without a settled CEO showed that clearly. Well-designed systems and capable people can carry an institution for a while. But not indefinitely.
• Governance is the foundation, not just a formality. A new, engaged Board resets the accountability tone for the whole institution and that tone matters to the sector too.
• Good tools need skilled people. The Bridge System and eDocS are real improvements, but they need confident, trained users to realise their value. Technology without people behind it just becomes expensive furniture.
• Small welfare investments pay back bigger than they look. In a specialist sector, losing experienced staff is costly. The health cover, wellness sessions, the reinstated retirement scheme they keep people who would otherwise leave.

 What is on the horizon for FY2026/27?

FY2026/27 is where we stop talking about the plan and start delivering it.

• Filling the team. We’ve launched a structured recruitment exercise for key positions across several directorates. Having the right people in the right seats isn’t a background HR task as it directly determines what URBRA can deliver to the sector.
• Living the strategy, not just having it. Every directorate enters the year with performance targets tied directly to the five-year strategy. The strategic plan should be more than a document on a shelf.
• Investing in cohesion. We’re kicking the year off with a full-day team building event for all staff knowing that numbers on a team don’t automatically become a team.
• URBRA goes into FY2026/27 in good shape. Leadership settled. Governance refreshed. Strategy rolling. The sector keeps growing the demands are real and they won’t slow down, but we won’t slow down either.