By Steven Enatu
SOROTI
The government of Uganda through the Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development has allocated over 1 billion Uganda shillings for youth livelihood programs to benefit youths across the ten districts of Teso including Soroti City.
The Youth Livelihood Program (YLP) is a Rolling Government of Uganda Program, targeting the poor and unemployed youth in all the Districts in the country. For some time, the government had suspended the program because of its poor performance.
Jacob Eyeru, the chairperson National youth council says they advocated for the program and the government has accepted to return it. He says the program had initially performed poorly in Teso because there was a gap in monitoring and this allowed the technical people to steal the funds.
“Youth leaders were not visiting the beneficiary groups to ensure that their enterprises were working well. We are streamlining and engaging youth leaders to be active in monitoring the program,” Eyeru revealed while handing over bicycles to parish youth leaders in Soroti County to monitor the programs.
He is optimistic that with the engagement approach, youth leaders will work closely with the beneficiaries to ensure the program is successful.
“I am making sure that the youth leaders at the district level understand their role, if I don’t move around as the national youth chairperson, then corruption begins to happen without anyone seeing it,” he said.
He blamed the previous failure of YLP on technical officers who would fraudulently steal money from the youth by giving them money on figure for example 12 million yet in actual figure, the group is given 7 million shillings.
Eyeru however expressed mixed reaction on youth involvement in the parish development model that has 30% of funding at parish level ring-fenced for the youth. He said in some areas the youth have embraced the program but in some areas, youths are not even aware.
“I am currently on the national tour to assess the impact of government programs on youths; I am both impressed but also noticing gaps, the impression is that where the youth leadership is vigilant, you find that they are gaining more, in district like Kiryandongo I visited three parishes and I found out that the youth are utilizing the PDM fund but other areas like Nwoya, Napak they don’t know what is going on. It’s about how local leadership is organized,” Eyeru noted.
