Fort Portal city groups yet to access PDM cash

FORT PORTAL – Fort Portal groups are yet to access money under the Parish Development Model [PDM] because they haven’t held their Annual General Meetings [AGMs] which is one of the requirements to access the funding from the government.

Fort Portal city received more than Shs 256 million for the 21 groups from both Central and North divisions but the money is still on the respective PDM SACCO accounts.

According to the Fort Portal city commercial officer, Micheal Karwani, none of the 21 groups from both Central and North divisions that are supposed to benefit from this funding has accessed the money.

Karwani said during the formation of these groups, they did not target a class of people that the president wants so they had to repeat the whole process of collecting household data to get the real class that is supposed to benefit.

“This PDM funding is meant for the active poor, the 39 percent but we realised even those who are already rich are in these groups so they had to send their people to collect household data targeting the real class of people supposed to benefit,” he said.

He said in the beginning, they rushed while forming enterprises because they feared the money would be taken back to the treasury and they ended up with the wrong membership.

He said the money is very safe on the respective PDM SACCO accounts and once the real data is collected to identify the real beneficiaries, they will train them, hold AGM and access the money.

Karwani said each of the 21 groups received Shs 12.2mln for this quarter and in the next quarter; they will receive the balance to make it Shs 17mln that they were supposed to receive in the first quarter.

PDM is an approach to organising and delivering public and private sector interventions for wealth creation at the parish level as the lowest economic unit for planning, budgeting, reporting, and delivery of interventions by both the state and non-state actors.

The parish is the epicenter of multi-sectoral community development, implementation, supervision, monitoring, and accountability.

The LC2 chairperson and parish chief are responsible for political stewardship in the implementation of the parish model in their respective parishes with support from the sub-county and district technical planning committee.

Through the PDM, government hopes to move 3.5mln households that are still in subsistence farming to the money economy, with each parish expected to get Shs 100mln each financial year for five years, beginning with the current financial year.

The Ministry of Finance last week announced it was about to release Shs250 billion for the PDM SACCOs across the country.

https://thecooperator.news/misuse-of-pdm-cash-nwoya-rdc-orders-arrest-of-officials/

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