By KT Reporter
The leaders of Lwengo District local government have appealed to the government to absolve them from the burden of recovering Youth Livelihoods Programme (YLP) loans due to high default rates.
In 2014, the government, through the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, introduced the YLP as a socio-economic empowerment initiative targeting to improve the income levels of the youths in organized groups.
Under the program, the government would directly provide the groups with interest-free revolving funds to spur their economic empowerment.
Vincent Birimuye, the Lwengo district Vice Chairperson, prefers that the government consider writing off the loans, arguing that the funds can no longer be recovered from the debtors, some of whom have since relocated to other places.
He is concerned that the district currently has poor accountability records with the Auditor General, whose reports have consecutively indicted the leaders for failing to recover the YLP loans.
According to the Auditor General, Lwengo district has since been funded with 1.12 billion shillings under YLP, and overall recovery by the end of the last financial year stood at only 672 million shillings.
Birimuye observes that recoveries were recorded in the earlier years of the programme’s implementation, and that the funded projects have since disintegrated, which makes recovery impossible.
He argues that in their last term of office, they made efforts to recover the loans in vain, which prompted the supervisors to start coercing the defaulters, many of whom went on the run, which affected their productivity.
According to him, because growth is not static, many of the program defaulters have since transitioned from the youth age bracket, and it has become practically impossible to recover the loans from them.
Peregrine Ssennozi, the Lwengo district Council Speaker, has called on the government to absolve the program defaulters, such that they can freely participate and benefit from the other livelihood improvement programs that the government initiated afterwards.
He observes that the Ministry of Finance has since been tasking them to pursue the defaulters, to the extent of threatening to block budget releases, but all their efforts have consistently failed to yield the preferred results.
Ssennozi indicates that it’s high time the government picked bitter lessons from the failures of the YLP, to help in better planning the implementation of other wealth creation schemes.
In 2023, the government substantially reduced the budget allocation to YLP and only maintained operational expenses after it emerged that the program had performed below expectations, due to a high default rate.
According to the 2023/14 Auditor General’s report, overall, the government had an outstanding loan balance of 129 billion shillings out of the 175.4 billion shillings invested so far-URN. Give us feedback on this story through our email: kamwokyatimes@gmail.com
