Youth Saccos yet to take off 8 years after promise was made

The promise:
One of the talking points of the NRM’s manifesto for the period between 2011 and 2015 was a plan aimed at strengthening the youths’ capacity to develop, among others things, their economic skills and capacities to ensure their increased participation in the development process and also as a way of improving their quality of life.

According to the party, this could be achieved through implementation of a five point action plan through which youths could access funding to enable them engage in various income generating activities.
One of the five action areas of intervention that was named was the creation of Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (Saccos) for only the youths.
“The NRM government shall promote the formation of Saccos for youth at sub-county level throughout the country as a means of economic empowerment,” the manifesto reads in part.

Other activities on the five action point plan included commencement of the student loan scheme, creation and operationalisation of a Youth Graduate Fund and pursuit of an aggressive programme aimed at creating jobs in various sectors of the economy.

In making the promise, the NRM boasted that the youth were central to the party gurus’ thinking, policy formulation and initiation of development programmes.
Testimony of this, it was argued, could be seen in programmes such as the mass immunisation drives and the Universal Primary Education (UPE) and Universal Secondary Education USE) programmes which it claimed had been implemented for the direct or indirect benefit of the youth, in the same way that jobs were being created across sectors for their direct benefit.
It was argued that the party’s and government’s youth policy had seven elements which included initiating, strengthening and streamlining all programmes and services targeting the youth; promoting the social and economic empowerment of the youth; building capacity and providing relevant training and information to the youth; and promoting growth in the development of the youth through actions that protect, empower and prepare them for the future.

The others were providing psycho-social support and other services to youth in conflict situations; increasing youth involvement in decision making and leadership at various levels; and mobilising resources for youth programmes and projects at all levels.

By the time the manifesto was launched at the Serena Conference Centre in Kampala, Uganda’s population was estimated at around 32 million people out of which 78 were believed to be youths between 15 and 30 years of age.
Despite the fact that the economy was said to be growing at an average rate of 7 per cent per year and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) said to be at 8.3 per cent, that had not translated into more jobs for the youths.
At the same time the African Development Bank’s (AfDB’s) Partnership Forum had put national unemployment figures at 83 per cent.

The promise to establish youth Saccos at sub-county level was, therefore, not only viewed as a furtherance of the party’s programme of mobilisation and distribution of resources for youth to engage in various programmes and projects, but also a viable partial solution to tackling the unemployment problem.

One of the biggest challenge for youth in rural settings or hard to reach areas has been access to banking services.
Commercial banks hardly operate in rural settings, which often means that people in such areas have neither a place to bank their savings nor where to borrow for purposes of either starting or boosting their businesses.
The idea of opening Saccos at sub-county level was, therefore, seen as a cure to this challenge.

At the same time, the Saccos were expected to help the youth not only to learn to develop a saving culture, but also provide much needed training in financial management.

The programme was meant to have kicked off as early as the financial year 2011/2012, but did not take off and has never taken off and there is very little likelihood that it will ever take off.
What has so far been seen are private initiatives funded by, among others the Uganda Central Co-operative Financial Services and the Uganda Youth Economic Empowerment programme through which youth Saccos have been formed, but not in the villages as had been envisaged in the NRM’s manifesto. Government has until now been missing in action.

Impact
Saccos work in such a way that they build up memberships and help inculcate a culture of saving as the members must first save up before they can access loans.
The opening of these Saccos at the sub-counties would have no doubt helped the youth out there, making saving up for any purposes, be it preparation for a rainy day or as collateral for a possible loan, a habit. That opportunity is now lost.

Secondly, most of rural Uganda has no access to banking facilities. Most financial institutions seem to prefer to operate in urban areas which are deemed to be more secure. This would, therefore, have been an opportunity to enable youth in the more rural areas access banking facilities without necessarily having to lure bigger financial institutions such as commercial banks to the villages.

Lastly the creation of the sub-county based Saccos was meant to have helped in the fight against unemployment and also helped the youth generate incomes that would have helped improved their incomes at household levels and in so doing lead to improved standards of life.

Jobs were meant to have been realised through both direct employment opportunities with their respective Saccos and also through the various economic activities that the Saccos were meant to have funded. Those jobs have not been created, which can only mean that the unemployment problem has exacerbated over the years.

According to figures from the 2014 national census, Uganda has a population of about 18 million people within the ages between 14 and 64 years, out of which 58 per cent or about 10.4 million people, are unemployed. The census report also revealed that 47 per cent of Ugandan males within the same age grouping are unemployed.
At the same time, there has been very little improvement in the household incomes and standards of living.

Official explanation
The Minister of State for Youth and Children Affairs, Ms Florence Nakiwala Kiyingi, told Daily Monitor on Monday that the idea of forming youth Saccos based at sub- county level is still very much on the cards and might happen sooner than later.
“It (Youth Saccos at sub-county level) is still an idea of the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development and we (Cabinet) are still scrutinising it. It is their mandate to organise societies and one of the challenges now is to work on financial literacy,” she told Daily Monitor.

MONITOR'S POSITION
One of the biggest challenges that the country has is how to attract foreign direct investments and also spur indigenous business communities to experience growth if it is to be able to generate jobs to take most of the youths off the streets.
Government has for quite some time now been singing its own praises as having made heavy investments into the development of infrastructure such as roads as a way of reducing the cost of doing business and positioning Ugandan as a favorable destination for investment.

Yes. We do agree that a lot has been done to develop the roads’ sector and fix the power deficit and for that we should say kudos, but a lot more needs to be done in the area of policy.
Manufacturers have for quite some time now been complaining that the cost of power is too high, but save for a few speeches, there seems to be no decisive action in addressing that challenge. The few indigenous people in business have also been calling for support similar to what the so called investors get from government, but again nothing has been done to address that. We need to address those contradictions.

As we address those challenges, we also be addressing the specific policies designed for specific sector just like the Youth Saccos at sub-county level had been designed to assist the youth create their own jobs, improve their household incomes and improve their standards of living.

Failure to address these sector designed policies is what has been pushing our youths into activism. Many of those that belong to groups like the jobless brotherhood, which have been dropping piglets painted yellow at Parliament and on streets of various towns across the country, do not do so because they do not support the sitting government.

They do so to nudge government into doing something to address their economic plight and also tackle key public concerns such as the abuse of public resources, waste through a bloated public expenditure and corruption, all of which affected every section of the citizenry be they or be they not supporters of the sitting government or not.