, well balanced to enable market participants make well informed investment decisions. the end goal for carrying out such training workshops and subsequent ones especially by quality trainers like the thomson reuters foundation is to build a pool of professional business journalists in uganda who will promote efficiency and development of financial markets in uganda. at this stage let me congratulate use ; the organizers of this workshop for bringing together a group of the most distinguished and experienced practitioners in the field of journalism to pass on their experience and skills as well as sharing best practices and initiatives in business journalism with their ugandan counterparts. i wish to encourage ugandan journalists to always strive for excellence and professionalism in their reporting. let me also thank the thomson reuters foundation ; a global leader in financial reporting, for playing its part and for partnering with ugandan institutions in having successfully produced at least 15 certified journalists from this training. the onus now remains with the ugandan journalists who have acquired the skills to put them to best use as they play their part in the development of financial markets in uganda. i wish to pledge bou ’ s continued support through the 5 - year fmdp project to uplift skills levels in our financial markets as we strive to improve efficiency and disclosure for the benefit of the investors. it is my belief that skills that you have acquired will improve on your business reporting and demystify financial markets operations for the good of ordinary ugandans. with those remarks, it is now my pleasure and privilege to declare this training workshop officially closed. thank you.

they could also be less than $ 50 per barrel. furthermore, even estimating the probability that oil prices will be $ 100 per barrel, or $ 80 per barrel or $ 40 per barrel, is very difficult. this is the essence of uncertainty : it involves risks which cannot objectively be quantified. 2. uncertainty and investment important innovations to the theory of investment decisions were made by economists in the 1980s. researchers such as ben bernanke, robert pindyck, dani rodrik and ricardo caballero demonstrated that decisions by private sector investors to undertake irreversible investments – that is investments with sunk costs – are very sensitive to risk and uncertainty about future prices, costs and other variables which affect the financial viability of the investment. faced with uncertainty about such variables, investors have incentives to delay their irreversible investments in order to wait for more information which will reduce that uncertainty. this is known as the option value of waiting. the greater is the risk and uncertainty about the future path of variables which affect the viability of an investment, the higher is the option value of waiting and the larger are the incentives facing the investors to delay their investment. bis central bankers ’ speeches what does this mean for uganda? uncertainty has implications for investment in both the oil industry and the rest of the economy. let me start with the oil industry. most of the capital investments in the oil industry are irreversible, especially those involving large scale infrastructure such as pipelines, so the option value of waiting will be a factor influencing investment decisions in the industry. given the uncertainty about long term oil prices, the probability that future oil prices will be too low to enable investments in the oil industry in uganda to be commercially viable over the lifetime of the projects is not zero. you may reasonably take the view that the probability that oil prices will be too low to ensure the viability of investments is small, but it cannot be dismissed entirely. investors in the oil industry face a tangible risk that global oil prices over the long term will render their investments unviable. that risk is higher today than it was prior to the fall in global oil prices in mid 2014. as a consequence, investors in the oil industry face incentives to delay or slow down their investments as they wait to see how global oil prices might evolve. that does not mean that oil companies will not invest in uganda ’ s oil industry, but it does mean that they will be more cautious about committing resources to irrevers