Stanbic, Dfcu struck off youth venture capital fund

Mondo Kyateeka, the assistant commissioner Youth Affairs at the ministry of Gender

What you need to know:

The banks failed to sensitise youth about the procedures of accessing the money.

KAMPALA- Government has withdrawn the youth venture capital fund from two commercial banks over failure to disburse loans to youths.

Mr Mondo Kyateeka, the assistant commissioner in charge of youth affairs at the ministry of Gender, Labour and Social development, said government withdrew the funds from Stanbic and dfcu banks after they failed to sensitise the youth about the procedures of accessing the money.

The money was instead channelled through Centenary Bank after the two demonstrated they could not deal with the youth, he said.

“We have tried as much as possible to access the youth with information regarding the Youth Venture Capital Fund because as far as March, we had funded only 5,000 projects all over the country,” Mr Kyateeka said during a three-day youth leadership training organised by the Uganda Youth Network and the international Republican Institute at the Esella Country home in Najjeera in wakiso District.

Asked why the absorption rate for the Shs.54b fund is very low, Mr Kyateeka said the two banks failed to sensitise the youth about the funds unlike the youth Livelihood programme where the funds go directly from Bank of Uganda to the youth projects.

When contacted for a comment, Mr Pius Bigirimana, the Ministry of Finance’s Permanent Secretary, denied knowledge of the development, saying he was not aware about the withdrawal of the money from the two banks.

“I know that last financial year, the Ministry of Finance released Shs19 billion for 27 districts and this year, Shs 35b for the whole country and the first beneficiaries have started repaying the money,” he said.

Mr Fred Mugisha, the head communications, Stanbic Bank, confirmed to Daily Monitor that they could not implement the programme. He cited the tedious processes involved before the youth could access the money.
“We did run the programme in 2013 but it was a lengthy tedious process because it was not straight forward since it required a lot of verifications to evaluate the applications and we wrote to the Ministry of Finance telling them we are not interested in the programme,” Mr. Mugisha said.

Mr Jude Katusiime, the Marketing manager, dfcu bank, however, denied knowledge of the development promising to furnish this newspaper with the “correct information”.

But he did not answer calls by press time yesterday. Dfcu managing director, Juma Kisame did not also take repeated calls to him.