As the country makes endeavors to alleviate poverty, there is a need for government to drop the idea of providing cash handouts to the people with hope to help them out of poverty, a legislator has observed.
The Mawogola South MP Gorreth Namugga was concerned that the trillions allocated in the national budget to constitute cash handouts to help beneficiaries start and grow enterprises have on many occasions been either misused or misallocated, with no tangible positive impact created in transforming people’s lives.
She reasoned that the cash allocated to people to deal with unemployment are pretty insignificant, given the available amount compared to the millions of people that would wish to access it.
“Uganda government needs to take a more sustainable and impactful approach to poverty alleviation by focusing on more strategic long-term entrepreneurship growth-oriented interventions rather than short-term cash handouts, that are even too little to satisfy our fast-growing population,” she said.
She was addressing residents of Sembabule district at St Peter’s Primary School-Mateete over the weekend at the closing of a one-week Business Enterprise Start-up Tool training she organised in partnership with Enterprise Uganda.
Namugga enumerated a number of poverty elevation schemes including but not limited to: Entandikwa, Youth Livelihood Program, Uganda Women Entrepreneurship Program, Emyooga and Parish Development Model, in which government has over the years pumped trillions in form of cash handouts, but on a critical value for money audit, the country is always at a loss, for hardly can one find progressive business persons whose success is attributed the same interventions.
Government recently earmarked an additional Shs 1.059 trillion for PDM with meaning each parish would get an additional Shs 100m to benefit more households, the total PDM funds since inception hit Shs 2.4 trillion; Shs 1m is earmarked per household.
THE CORRECT LINE
The MP proposed that government instead ought to primarily channel more financial resources towards supporting business-oriented mindset change initiatives, because failure in financial life in most instances is caused by lack of knowledge and motivation to engage in the right ventures in the right ways.
Charles Ocici, the executive director Enterprise Uganda, pledged that his entity would strengthen capacity, reach many more Ugandans and spread the mindset change message about entrepreneurship, encourage them to start and empower them to run a sustainable business journeys.
“A positive mindset is a powerful tool for transforming communities and fostering sustainable entrepreneurship. Many potential entrepreneurs struggle with limiting beliefs, fear of failure, and dependency on external aid. By fostering mindset change initiatives, we can unlock entrepreneurial potential and drive long-term economic growth,” he said.
Ocici pointed out that supporting the growth of enterprises among communities helps in profitable use of the infrastructure put in place by government because most of them should be meant to facilitate trade.
“Most of the improved rural roads, electricity, industrial parks and processing zones and water supply can only be more meaningful to communities if they are used to boost production and productivity and ease access to markets,” he said.
Ocici cautioned Sembabule residents against over concentrating on perennial cash crops like coffee, neglecting other traditional food crops like cassava, sweet potatoes and matooke; otherwise, many could find themselves selling coffee to buy food.
Yasin Lulangwa, a local farmer and educationist pointed that rural transformation needs a stronger helping hand from government in form of; subsidizing the costs of agro-processing equipment, irrigation initiatives, regulating borrowing costs, easing access to markets, availing improved seedlings, construction of modern valley dams- all being catalytic factors for boosting agricultural production and productivity.
Most Ugandans don’t emulate entrepreneurship model and would rather divert the same funds provided to their basic needs instead of investing.