Fort Portal city authorities are stuck with over 250 million Shillings meant for disbursement to Parish Development Model (PDM) groups because of their failure to fulfill some of the requirements.
Michael Karwani, the Fort Portal city commercial officer, says that none of the 21 groups from the North and Central Divisions has held the Annual General Meeting, which is a key requirement for them to access the funding.
He explains, that each of the 21 SACCOs is entitled to 12,239,928 Shillings, which they cannot receive for now.
“North division has 9 registered SACCOS while Central Division has 12. The SACCOS opened accounts in Housing Finance Bank Fort Portal branch and each of these has already got money deposited on their accounts, but they cannot access it or use it,” Karwani told us
According to Karwani, in addition to the failure of the Saccos to conduct AGMs, the implementing team lacks funds to carry out sensitization meetings among the beneficiaries and the general public.
He explains that for the SACCOs to operate, household data is needed and this is still being collected from the households that registered to benefit from the program. After the data collection, they will carry out sensitization among the beneficiaries and leaders at the parish level who are the direct supervisors of the project.
Karwani told us that his office needs at least 3 million Shillings to carry out sensitization in each of the 25 wards of the city.
The Fort Portal Resident City Commissioner, Angalia Kasigwa says that the money has not yet been made accessible to the beneficiaries because they are waiting for guidelines on how the money will be disbursed.
The Parish Development Model (PDM) which was launched by President Yoweri Museveni in February 2022, is a strategy for organizing and delivering public and private sector interventions for wealth creation and employment generation at the parish level as the lowest economic planning unit.
Under the program, each parish is expected to receive Shs100 million to benefit various categories of people to eradicate poverty.
