Alveron Advisory Services Begins Global Fund-Sponsored Power BI Training for MoFPED

Alveron Advisory Services today, 19 October 2026, began facilitating Global Fund-sponsored Power BI training for Uganda’s Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (MoFPED). The programme focuses on helping technical officers turn financial data into clear, interactive management reports.

Aiden David Rujumba, Commissioner and Head of Financial Management Services Department (FMSD), officially opened the training at MoFPED’s premises on Apollo Kaggwa Road, Kampala. The five-day programme runs from 19 to 23 October and is designed for 43 technical officers from the Assets Management, Financial Management Services and Management Information Systems departments.

Alveron is delivering the assignment as MoFPED’s contracted training facilitator, with sponsorship from the Global Fund. Robert Mwesige represents Alveron as Engagement Director, while Richard Kanyesigye leads the technical training.

Commissioner calls for clearer financial reporting

Opening the training, Rujumba urged officers to make better use of the information already held in the Ministry’s public financial management systems.

He said: “Our work depends on data: budgets, expenditure, revenue, commitments, and financial performance.”

Rujumba highlighted a familiar reporting challenge: the effort devoted to collecting and reconciling information can leave too little time to analyse it. He called for timely, clear information that management can act upon, supported by skills in data modelling, visualisation and business intelligence.

He linked the training to the Ministry’s data governance ambitions, including future data warehouse and business intelligence work. He also placed it within the MoFPED Strategic Plan for 2025/26 to 2029/30 and the public financial management reform agenda. The training objectives include budget tracking, financial and economic analysis, repeatable reporting workflows and secure collaboration across votes.

Addressing the facilitation team, Rujumba said: “To our facilitators, I ask that you keep the sessions practical, hands-on and relevant to our public financial management context.”

He asked participants to attend punctually, practise actively, work together and share their learning with colleagues. Emphasising the importance of participation, he added: “Skills are gained by doing.”

A practical programme for MoFPED technical officers

The programme is organised into morning and afternoon cohorts covering the same curriculum. This arrangement allows officers to attend training while maintaining departmental operations.

The training design allocates at least 80 per cent of learning activity to practical computer work. It combines live demonstrations, guided labs, individual exercises and group troubleshooting, supported by coaching at participants’ laptops.

The programme includes a skills diagnostic and simulation datasets covering budget execution, revenue collections and public debt. Digital reference notes, a DAX handbook and reusable Power BI project files are scheduled for handover, giving officers resources for continued practice after the training.

What the MoFPED Power BI training programme covers

Data connections and repeatable imports

The opening module on 19 October introduces Power BI Desktop, the Power BI service, Microsoft Fabric and OneLake. It compares Import, DirectQuery and Direct Lake so that participants can relate storage choices to data volumes, update requirements and security. Import stores a copy of source data; DirectQuery sends queries to the source; Direct Lake works with Delta tables in Fabric’s OneLake environment.

The opening-day lab agenda covers Excel workbooks, CSV and text files, parameterised web queries and SQL Server or Oracle staging extracts modelled on Integrated Financial Management System and Programme Budgeting System reporting structures.

A folder-based exercise is designed to consolidate successive monthly budget files. Participants are expected to address missing columns, changing file structures and inconsistent data types, while using parameters to make source paths reusable. Microsoft’s file-combination guidance explains the importance of consistent structures. For an imported model, new files are incorporated when the configured refresh runs.

Power Query and financial data modelling

On 20 October, the second module will cover cleaning and restructuring data in Power Query. Tasks include removing blank rows, converting monthly columns into rows through unpivoting, splitting budget-account strings with M functions such as Text.Split and Text.Select, and handling data types, errors and missing values. Query folding is also on the curriculum, allowing supported transformations to be passed to a capable source system for execution.

The modelling work brings approved budgets, warrants, cash releases and expenditure into separate fact tables, connected to common date, chart-of-accounts and vote dimensions. In a star schema, these dimensions provide the categories used to filter and group financial amounts. The programme addresses one-to-many relationships, controlled filter direction, model validation and hiding technical keys from report users.

A dedicated date table will be built around the July-to-June fiscal cycle, with fiscal years, quarters, month numbers and sorting columns. The asset-management example links an asset register to revaluations, depreciation and maintenance costs. Together, these exercises show how departments can analyse related records without repeatedly assembling a single spreadsheet.

DAX measures and fiscal analysis

Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), Power BI’s calculation language, forms the third module on 21 October. The programme distinguishes measures, which respond to the report’s filter context, from calculated columns evaluated for individual rows. It covers row and filter context, iterators such as SUMX and AVERAGEX, and CALCULATE, which evaluates expressions in a modified filter context and can perform context transition.

Participants will build measures for total approved budget, expenditure, execution variance, budget absorption and warrant utilisation. For example, the programme defines budget absorption as expenditure divided by approved budget. ALL and ALLEXCEPT are included to explore how selected filters can be removed or retained when calculating shares of totals.

Time-intelligence exercises cover fiscal year-to-date expenditure, prior-year comparisons, year-on-year change and rolling 12-month analysis. The fiscal calendar matters because a July-to-June reporting year requires an appropriate year-end definition rather than an assumed calendar year. Measures will also be organised into dedicated tables and display folders for easier review.

The programme includes a Copilot demonstration for drafting and explaining DAX. Access depends on the organisation’s supported capacity and Copilot settings. Generated calculations still need to be checked against the intended financial definitions and source data.

Interactive reports for management questions

The fourth module, scheduled for 22 October, addresses how financial analysis is presented. It covers KPI cards, sparklines, conditional formatting, trend charts and detailed tables, with attention to readable type, restrained colour, alignment and mobile layouts.

Waterfall charts will be used to explore changes in financial totals, while decomposition trees allow users to investigate how results vary across programmes, sub-programmes, votes and expenditure items. These breakdowns help analysts identify areas for further investigation.

The interactivity exercises include vote-specific drill-through pages, contextual tooltip pages, and bookmarks and the Selection pane for switching views and resetting filters. These Power BI report features let a reader move from a summary indicator to the relevant detail, supporting questions about budget absorption, historical performance and the financial position of individual votes.

Publishing and controlled access

The final module on 23 October will cover publishing to the Power BI service, workspaces, app distribution and the responsibilities of Admin, Member, Contributor and Viewer roles. It also includes scheduled refresh, on-premises data gateways and email subscriptions.

Row-level security is central to the governance module. The exercise uses USERPRINCIPALNAME() and a user-to-data mapping table to restrict the rows a person can see, followed by role testing. This addresses the commissioner’s expectation that officers should access assigned information while authorised management users can see consolidated totals.

Microsoft’s row-level security guidance explains how workspace permissions affect access: row restrictions apply to Viewers, while Admins, Members and Contributors retain broader editing permissions. Participants will work through identity mapping and role testing alongside refresh configuration for keeping published reports up to date.

Robert Mwesige and Richard Kanyesigye lead the assignment

Robert Mwesige, Alveron Advisory Services’ Senior Consultant, serves as Engagement Director. His role covers engagement oversight and logistical, administrative and technical coordination. He brings a background in management consulting, human resources and corporate training, and holds an Executive MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology in Washington DC, USA.

Richard Kanyesigye is the Lead Facilitator. A Microsoft Certified Data Analyst Associate with Power BI, he holds an MSc in Information Technology from Sikkim Manipal University and has more than a decade of experience spanning data management, analytics, internal audit and IT forensics.

Kanyesigye previously served as Manager Internal Audit and Supervisor Forensic Investigations at the Uganda Revenue Authority. He has also trained MoFPED technical staff in Advanced Microsoft Excel. That combination of analytical and public-institution experience is relevant to a curriculum centred on financial records, calculation logic and reporting controls.

For this assignment, Kanyesigye’s technical facilitation and Mwesige’s engagement oversight sit within Alveron’s contracted delivery role.

A capstone focused on public finance questions

On the final day, the programme will culminate in a group project bringing together officers from the three departments. Working with simulation data, teams will prepare an executive financial report covering budget absorption, revenue collections against targets and projected debt-service obligations over the next 36 months.

The task requires participants to clean the data, build a model, write measures and design an interactive presentation. Its assessment framework covers model architecture, calculation accuracy, visual clarity, interactivity and security, alongside the team’s explanation of its work.

The final day will also include a practical competency assessment, participant feedback and handover of digital learning materials. Assessment results and the facilitation report will support evaluation of learning and recommendations for continued application within the Ministry.

Turning training into everyday reporting practice

For MoFPED’s finance, asset-management and information-systems teams, the intended value is a connected reporting workflow: source records can be prepared consistently, analysed against clear definitions and presented to authorised users in a form they can explore.

For organisations considering Power BI training in Uganda, the assignment illustrates a useful design principle for public-sector data analytics training: connect the software skills to the reports people actually need to produce. Here, the curriculum follows the commissioner’s priorities by linking financial data preparation to practical analysis, management reporting and the transfer of skills to colleagues.

Organisations seeking tailored Power BI training for their teams can contact Alveron Advisory Services or email info@alveronadvisory.org to discuss their reporting needs.