Members of the Parliamentary Accounts Committee (PAC) have urged the ministry of local government to strengthen reforms in the Vision 2020 Umurenge Program aimed at assisting vulnerable people.
Reacting to the auditor general’s report 2009-2010, the PAC parliamentarians chaired by Juvenal Nkusi, grilled the MINALOC permanent secretary Cyril
Turatsinze and his colleagues on the uncountable funds in the project.
However, journalists were denied the statistics. “We are still verifying the figures,” he said.
Meanwhile during the four hour Question and answer session , Turatsinze agreed that a good number of things didn’t go as expected during the program’s inception.
He noted that financial institutions at the local level for example refused to work jointly with MINALOC in issuing credit to those who had promising projects. Hence the project was integrated to Ubudehe a fund used to support common community activities. “The banks were afraid to take the risk that’s why we had to come up with another option”
“Most of the beneficiaries were living in extreme poverty and didn’t have collateral as a requirement for them to get credit but since our aim is to help them we gave them the credit with agreements on how they will pay but it’s unfortunate that some didn’t respect the agreement,” he pointed out.
“However, there have been measures to reduce the non performing loans; they now stand at 50%.”
Also there are those who took credit with specific projects but later changed to cheaper ones in order to save some amount. Others took the loans as a group and later divided the amount amongst them a fact that affected the accountability process.
Illiteracy and lack of awareness also complicated the process, “can you imagine some people were not aware of the bank account to pay the loan and rather deposited in their own accounts thinking by doing so they were paying back the loans,” Turatsinze remarked.
Also some leaders of cooperatives swindled the funds; in Ruganda sector a similar cooperative dealing with agriculture produce was left stuck after their leader ran away with the funds.
This behaviour is believed to be influenced by those who faked to be vulnerable yet they’re wealthy people who wanted to swindle the funds.
Lastly, evaluation of VUP funds was not done competently, that’s why a committee in charge of the program enforced reforms to strengthen the program.
Among the reforms, beneficiaries involved in agriculture activities are obliged to pay the credit within two years.
In terms of issuing credit, priority will be given to cooperatives since groups seemed disorganized. In addition the funds will be given in intervals to verify whether the amount was effectively utilized in each stage of their project proposal.
In regard to enhance transparency and evaluation the fund’s management, district offices will also oversee the implementation of various funded projects. The fund’s committee will be meeting monthly to review progress.
ENDS
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