The Parish Development Model (PDM), launched by President Yoweri Museveni in Kibuku district last month, aims to lift 17.5 million Ugandans in 3.5 million households out of poverty through the total transformation of the subsistence households into the money economy.
Since poverty and unemployment are linked, the PDM is expected to stimulate job creation for Ugandans.
Under the PDM, two pillars, mainly Pillar 1 (Production, Storage, Processing and Marketing) and Pillar 3 (Financial Inclusion), demonstrate high potential for job creation. Several jobs could be created through agro-Industrialisation, private sector development, digital transformation and manufacturing programmes under Pillar 1. Similarly, with the Parish Revolving Fund under Pillar 3, beneficiaries will access low-cost loans and invest in different income-generating projects, hence job creation. In addition to improved access to financial services, households will be equipped with skills for enterprise growth, value addition and marketing of their products and services, which can potentially spur employment creation.
However, the PDM, although premised on the third National Development Plan (NDP III), seems not to be clearly aligned to the job creation strategy of NDP III, which aims to create an average of about 512,000 jobs annually and about 2.5 million jobs over the NDP III period (2020/21 – 2024/25). Under the jobs strategy, the services sector is expected to contribute the highest number of jobs (1.3 million), followed by agriculture (0.8 million), and then industry (0.4 million), but how the PDM will contribute to the NDP III job targets remains unclear.
PDM is expected to move 3.5 million households from subsistence to money economy. Photo/intelligent living
It is worth remembering that several government policies, such as Buy Uganda Build Uganda Policy (2014), and the National Industrial Policy (2020) speak to employment creation as the PDM. However, the implementation of these policies has not yielded as many jobs for Ugandans as anticipated. These policies tend to speak of employment creation broadly, without regard to the specific details in terms of how many jobs, how the jobs will be created, the responsible actors, and the timelines.
Therefore, the PDM should be aligned to NDP III’s employment targets. The Ministry of Local Government, which is primarily responsible for the implementation of the PDM and the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development (MGLSD) that is responsible for the employment of Ugandans should work together to align the PDM with the NDP III jobs strategy, and specify how the jobs will be created, where the jobs will be created (under which programmes), the timelines, and responsible actors. This way, it would be easier to monitor progress over time and hold the responsible actors accountable.
Further, the PDM should draw lessons from past government interventions for supporting job creation, such as Uganda Women Entrepreneurship Programme (UWEP) and Youth Livelihood Programme (YLP) that suffered several setbacks. These include limited coordination among stakeholders, inadequate funding and capacity to implement among others. To ensure that such issues do not re-emerge and impede implementation of the PDM, the government should ensure broad stakeholder buy-in and coordination, provide adequate funding, and strengthen the implementation capacity, especially for parish chiefs and parish development committees.
The government should sensitize the public to understand the PDM and how it will work so that citizens do not consider it as a mechanism for accessing free money or “akasiimo” from the government and misuse the funds meant for investing in different projects.