Prime
Agricultural officers should supervise PDM
Author, Nicholas Katsigaire. PHOTO/COURTESY
What you need to know:
- My worry is that funds will be put in the hands of wrong technocrats...
The Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, Mr Matia Kasaija, said the Parish Development Model (PDM) is a strategy for organising and delivering public and private sector interventions for wealth creation and employment generation at the parish level as the lowest economic planning unit.
Its implementation is expected to mark a major milestone in Uganda’s development in three ways. One, it will accelerate implementation of Area-Based Commodity Development (ABCD) planning, which is vital for realising the quantity and quality of agricultural production that is required for agro-industrialisation and export development.
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Two, it will also extend the whole-of-government approach for development to the parish level in a consolidated manner as opposed to working in silos and Lastly, to localise Vision 2040 and the National Development Plan for effective measurement and management of development interventions.
The model is purely an agricultural scheme which the government says is intended to alleviate poverty among 68 percent of households engaged in subsistence agriculture.
Farmers at the parish level are expected to be the primary implementers of the project that is purely agrarian.
It is on record that to achieve any agricultural transformation, the country needs to have a critical mass of agricultural technicians both in public and private sector working on a daily basis with smallholder farmers and other value chain actors to facilitate technology uptake and value chain development.
The national agricultural extension strategy set a target of recruiting 12,036 as the minimum staff needed in the public sector for an agricultural revolution to be effected. However, they later made a tentative plan to have at least 5,000 extension workers to boost farmers’ needs across the country due to financial constraints. Government has so far recruited 4,100 agricultural extension staff.
According to Financial Year 2019/2020, the extension worker to farming household ratio was about 1:1,800. However, the internationally accepted ratio is 1:500, meaning there is still a gap to achieve that.
To my surprise, instead of filling these gaps, and allowing the agriculture sector to remain in the hands of technocrats, the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF) now proposes to change the duty schedule and qualifications of parish chiefs to include agriculture and rural development to compliment agricultural extension services.
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This calls for training of all the parish chiefs already employed, more recruitment and training to the new parish chiefs since more than 10,000 parishes countrywide have no chiefs.
My worry is that funds will be put in the hands of wrong technocrats and might end up being mismanaged as has happened with several previous programmes, and the beneficiary who is a rural person at grass root is the one to miss out.
So why doesn’t government recruit more agriculture extension workers to manage this particular project?
If my memory serves me right, in 2014, Cabinet restructured National Agriculture Advisory Services (Naads) programme and shifted the mandate of agriculture extension service delivery back to the MAAIF under the directorate of agriculture extension services.
The MAAIF is, therefore, responsible for coordinating agriculture extension service delivery countrywide both public and private. With all this background, why does MAAIF want to neglect its primary role and hand it over to a different ministry?
Mr Nicholas Katsigaire is an agribusiness Graduate and a small scale farmer. [email protected]
