PDM: A game changer towards citizens' prosperity

By Ambassador Henry Mayega

A couple of years ago, the Yoweri Museveni administration inaugurated the Parish Development Model (PDM) in Uganda, proposed as a tool to pull our citizenry out of poverty. 

As a follow-up of be-tidings of the model, President Yoweri Museveni, has of recent, been touring various parts of the country to assess for himself the impact of this rather wonderful measure and his discoveries have been astounding. 

Essentially, the PDM is a government initiative whose objective is to transform subsistence households into the money economy, ideally entailing uplifting approximately 17.5 million Ugandans in 3.5 million households out of poverty while focusing on wealth creation and employment generation at the parish level.

It is worth noting that the PDM policy framework of 2022 will have its impact measured in the FY 2024/25, strategically at the tail end of NDP III. 

This well-thought-out Yoweri Museveni administration’s seven multidimensional interventions are being implemented to, amongst others, spur the following:

First, agricultural value chain development is one of the targets essentially proposed to up: production, storage facilitation, agricultural processing, and marketing. 

Uganda had suffered from haphazard value chain issues for years, yet the answer lay in creating an environment devoid of incessant bottlenecks that debilitated forward and backward linkages that ensured constancy of agricultural product supplies to both regional and international markets.

That, once successful, will boost the economic and commercial diplomacy (ECD) currently being implemented by Uganda’s diplomatic missions whose job it is, amongst others, to look for markets for Uganda’s goods.

Secondly, the Yoweri Museveni administration embarked, years ago, on upping infrastructural and economic services that are currently buttressing the value chain in reference here.

The government has, severally, been investing heavily in the road as well as other infrastructures that support the agricultural sector.

This administration has tarmacked more roads than both the colonial and the immediate post-independence governments combined up to 1986; by the time this administration took government, the country had only 1000km of paved roads classified as national roads. 

Those numbers currently, Uganda’s recessing opposition oligarchs won’t agree, stand somewhere close to 10,000km.

This column must add that had it not been the insecurities that diverted resources to defence between 1986 - 20005, those numbers would have been much bigger.

Thirdly, financial inclusion (FI) is a cornerstone of the PDM strategy; in FY 2023/24, sh1097.6b was appropriated by the August house for the PDM program of which sh1594b was set aside for the parish revolving fund purposed to fund 10,594 PDM SACCOS in 176 local governments and KCCA; with each SACCO benefiting with sh100m per FY to spur community development through viable income generating enterprises.

One important spin-off resulting from such inclusion is that people’s disposable income will rise simultaneously with available re-investable savings.

Fourthly, the PDM program whose benefits are also built in the NDP III has emphasized the delivery of social services to communities; such services include education, healthcare, housing, food security, job training and placement, disability assistance, elderly care, family support, substance abuse and mental illness, advocacy etc. 

Essentially the PDM is deliberately or better still impliedly geared towards providing achievable targets that would uplift citizens from the damn poverty pit to enable them to fend for themselves.

Fifthly, community mobilization and mindset change are other dimensions of the PDM. 
President Yoweri Museveni is currently touring the country to, amongst other things, mobilize citizens, positively tune citizens’ mindsets, hear for himself what so far has been achieved, direct government officials to take up corrective measures where mistakes are being made, as well as appraise the PDM success stories to even do better.

The Ugandan voter should remember that this President is different; he’s not an arm-chair politician; he is a field politician unlike many of those who crowd our political canvas.

Last but not least, the parish development management information system (PDMIS) as well as governance and administration are, in part, aspects the PDM policy is vitalizing. 

The PDM is a brainchild of the President; as such he has, during his countrywide tours, emphasized effective and efficient administration of the policy plus the need to expose citizens to modern accounting as well as IT technology as a way of managing procedural issues well.

The writer is a diplomat