Fort Portal City Stuck with UGX250M Parish Model Cash

URN – 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 fulfil 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 have 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 can’t 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 have already got money deposited on their accounts, but they cannot access it or use it,” Karwani told URN.

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.

‘’We need transport to go to hard-to-reach areas to educate the people and also sensitize them on what to do with the money because we still have a challenge with the Emyooga funds where people thought it was a free token from the government and with PDM if not well educated, they will think the same,’’ he said.

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.