KASESE – Kasese district LCV chairperson, Erifaz Muhindi has appealed to the residents in the district to embrace government programmes such as the Parish Development Model [PDM] and others if they are to fight poverty and improve their livelihoods.
Muhindi said government wants to get Ugandan citizens out of poverty through its programmes like the PDM, Emyooga Programme, Youth Livelihood Programme [ULP], and Uganda Women Entrepreneurship Programme [UWEP] among others, even though some people, due to various reasons, are hesitant to embrace the programmes.
Muhindi was speaking during a community engagement at Multi-purpose Hall in Kasese town on Thursday.
“Government programmes are very important because most of them help people get start-up capital. Emyooga and PDM are very unique because the money is a revolving fund and keeps on rotating within the beneficiaries and keeps on growing once it’s used effectively for the right purpose,” Muhindi said.
He urged the people to work hard by participating in agriculture and embracing a saving culture through SACCOs.
“You need to engage in economic activities like agriculture and also form SACCOs. Government is now helping people who are organised in different groups especially SACCOs because it [government] assumes that such groups of people are able to help each other grow,” he said.
He emphasised that joining SACCOs can help them grow easily through getting loans at low interest rates as compared to commercial banks and other financial institutions.
“A programme like the PDM is meant to benefit the active poor and most of these are engaged in agriculture. The PDM fund will help them especially those who were doing subsistence agriculture to transform to the money economy,” he said.
He however appealed to the people of Kasese to engage in agricultural activities that are friendly to the environment.
‘Agriculture is the backbone of Uganda’s economy and it can help improve household incomes but you need to go commercial. The president [Museveni] is encouraging us to practice commercial farming whether on small scale or on large scale,” Muhindi noted.
PDM is meant to accelerate wealth creation and improve the welfare of Ugandans by delivering services at the parishes, considered to be the epicentres of all the programme’s activities.
The PDM was launched in 2022 to benefit 39 percent of Uganda’s population considered to be poor so that they improve their household incomes through commercial production, especially in the agriculture sector where they can grow coffee, bananas, grains, cereals, do piggery, poultry keeping, dairy farming , and fish farming among others,
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