On Sunday 3rd
June, 2012, local citizens from Ntoroko district appeared on the ‘the listener’s
forum’ radio program on Better FM in Fort Portal to highlight the issues
affecting their district in-terms of service delivery.
The Listeners
Forum radio program is held every Sunday (08:00 – 10:00pm) on Better FM radio.
It is sponsored by ToroDev and is aimed at improving accountability from local
leaders for improved service delivery in the Rwenzori Region, Western
Uganda.
Ntoroko District Chairperson (Right) and ToroDev Staff (Left) during the talkshow
The local
citizens from Ntoroko District who appeared on the Talkshow to discuss, “Good
Governance and Service Delivery in Rwenzori Region; A case of Ntoroko
District,” included Mirembe Amos, Rusoke Julius, Balinda Moses and Muntu.
The issues
which were raised on the live talkshow included the poor state of the health
sector in the district with limited medical staff, poor management of the
Ntoroko fishing site, favoritism in the recruitment of the district staff, no
electricity connection despite electricity lines passing through their district
and the poor state of the roads.
However,
according to Byaruhanga Sight, one of the listeners of the radio program, who
is also a local resident of Ntoroko district, the issue which raised most resentment
from the district leadership was the Rwebisengo – Rwangara road which was
responsible for the high road accident deaths due to many potholes.
Byaruhanga
while sharing his experiences on the impact of the ‘Listener Forum’ radio
program during a one day evaluation workshop for the radio program held at St.
Josephs Inn in Fort Portal on 21st June, 2012 indicated that there
was a lot of concern on the road because it’s a lifeline of the district
economy since it connects to the two Vandals (cattle markets) of Nyakasenyi and
Kyabukunguru.
According to
Byaruhanga, the NtoroKo District Chairperson fixed the potholes before the
cattle market day which is always there on Thursdays of every week to avert a
possible demonstration based on the comments of the participants on the radio
program. At the end of every radio program, 30 minutes are always dedicated to
the listeners to participate in the discussions through call-ins and SMS.
The Ntoroko
District Chairperson also appeared on the same Radio Program on 10th
June, 2012 to give accountability and clarify on the issues raised by local
citizens in the previous radio program.
Toro Development Network (ToroDev) runs a live radio
talkshow on Better FM radio, in Fort Portal. The live talkshow discusses issues
of public accountability for improved service delivery in the seven districts
of Rwenzori Region, Western Uganda.
The radio talkshow is called “The Listener’s Forum” and runs
every Sunday (08:00 to 10:00pm) for one year (January to December, 2012).
During the talkshow, local citizens participate through
call-ins, SMS and live participation on the talkshow to demand accountability
from their local leaders. Local leaders also participate on the live talkshow
to give accountability to the local citizens.
Before, we call in local leaders to clarify on some of
the issues on the live talkshow raised by the local citizens; we conduct a
research to prove the claims of the local citizens.
Many times we have conducted our research, the state of
service delivery in Rwenzori Region districts like in many other parts of
Uganda is appalling simply because people are still ignorant with no skills and
knowledge to demand accountability from their local leaders and also monitor
public services. There are also high levels of corruption among public servants
and political leaders leading to shoddy work.
The photos below show the state of service delivery in
Kabarole district Sub-Counties of Hakibaale and Mugusu.
Local Leaders from Kijura Sub-County Participating on the Listeners Forum Radio Program
Six youth entrepreneurship groups have been formed in Nkoma
Sub County in Kamwenge district to help in business development among the
heavily unemployed youth in the district. The groups include; Mukore United
Association, Mabale Youth Development Network, Bisozi Parish Youth Association,
Kaberebere Youth Poultry Farmers Club, Kakinga Youth Farmers Group and
Rwembirizi Youth Development Group.
The groups were formed after an entrepreneurship training
workshop under the theme, “innovation and entrepreneurship skills among the
youth.” held at Nkoma Sub-County headquarters on 30th May, 2012. The
training was organized by the Kamwenge district youth Councilor Hon. Monday
Wilson and facilitated by Toro Development Network (ToroDev).
Entrepreneurship Training in Kamwenge District
The 35 participants who attended the one day workshop
were trained in business group formation skills, skills in designing business
plans, credit access, income generation, market access, skills in using ICT’s
like FM radio stations and mobile phones for entrepreneurship development
through information access and sharing.
The Kamwenge District Youth Councilor, Hon. Monday Wilson
appealed to the youth in Nkoma Sub county to get more involved in agriculture
to reduce unemployment among the youth which in affecting the country (Uganda).
Hon. Monday further appealed to the participants to strengthen
their groups and create more partnerships with the civil society and government
to tap the opportunities available for development.
The meeting was also attended by the Nkoma Sub County
Chief, Nkoma Sub County Chairperson and Kamwenge District Speaker.
ToroDev was represented by Johnstone Baguma (Executive
Director) and Akugizibwe Solomon (Media and Communications Officer) who
facilitated the entire one day exercise.
Unemployment rates among the youth in Uganda remain the
highest in the world, government efforts to reduce the unemployment rates among
the youth through initiatives like setting up the Youth Fund has not helped
solve the problem.
Radio
journalists from eleven FM Rwenzori Region FM radio stations have formed a
forum called Rwenzori Journalist Forum (RJF). The forum was created after a
three days residential training workshop held between 3rd to 5th
April, 2012 at St. Joseph’s Inn, Virika in Fort Portal – Uganda. The workshop
was organized by Toro Development Network (ToroDev) – A fort Portal based ICT
for Development organization.
The
local FM radio journalists created the forum for continued information and
knowledge sharing on issues of improved socio-economic development broadcasting,
advocacy for improved policies on information access especially from local and
central governments and advocacy for the rights of journalists among other things.
Participants with Hon. Alex Ruhunda (middle)
The
three days journalists training workshop included radio journalists/presenters
from the eleven (11) rural FM radio stations based in the Rwenzori region
districts of Kabarole, Kyenjojo, Kamwenge, Bundibugyo and Kasese.
‘’The
forum will bring us together and share a lot of information and facts regarding
public accountability.” Said Patrick Bamanyisa the Programs Director of Voice
of Tooro 101 FM. Bamanyisa was elected as the interim chairperson of the
Rwenzori Journalist Forum.
The
3 days training workshop on socio-economic broadcasting for community
development attracted 30 FM radio staff invited from the 11 radio stations.
They included news editors, program moderators and programs directors.
The
training was facilitated by three consultants from PANOS Eastern Africa, Human
Rights Network Uganda (HURINET-U) and Uganda Journalist Union (UJU). Ten (10)
members of the listenership clubs were also invited to share and interact with
media practitioners and also gain more skills to participate in broadcasting
for socio-economic development.
The trainings focused on issues
related to active participation of marginalized population groups (rural women
& youths) in local government budgeting processes, monitoring service
delivery & public accountability, designing pro-rural public accountability
radio programs, establishing and strengthening linkages between FM radio staff
and listeners, socio-economic information access and broadcasting and rights of
journalists and development activists.
The workshop was opened officially by
the Kabarole District Chairperson Hon. Rwabuhinga Richard on 3rd
April, 2012 who called for professional reporting for community development.
Rwabuhinga also promised improved cooperation in information access to local FM
radio journalists.
The training workshop was closed by
the Fort Portal Municipality Member of Parliament Hon. Alex Ruhunda on 5th
April, 2012 who promised support in improved policies and laws at the central
government level to enable the creation of a favorable environment to radio journalists
for improved community development broadcasting.
ToroDev Media and Communications Officer,
Akugizibwe Solomon attended the two days 8th CAADP Partnership
Platform Meeting in Nairobi Kenya from 3-4th May, 2012. The meeting
was held at The Hilton Hotel, Nairobi, Kenya.
The theme of the
conference was “Accelerating Implementation for Results and Impact”
The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development
Programme (CAADP) is the Africa owned and Africa led initiative to boost
agricultural productivity. CAADP is an agricultural development arm of the New
Partnership for African Development (NEPAD). NEPAD is the development arm of
the African Union (AU).
Solomon Akugizibwe (Left)
With support from CAADP, 29 countries have signed
Compacts and more than 20 countries have established Agriculture and Food
Security Investment Plans.
CAADP advocates for more inclusive participation of
all relevant players in sectoral planning, raising the political profile of
agriculture, more specific, purposeful and incentive-oriented agricultural
policies, improved donor coordination, harmonisation and alignment to country
priorities, increased resources allocated to targeted high-potential programmes,
stronger regional co-operation, mechanisms for M&E, peer review, dialogue
and accountability and growing public sector budget commitment to agriculture.
During the meeting, Akugizibwe advocated for
increased access to land for youth for agricultural development, modernization of
the agricultural sector so as to make it more attractive to the youth and more
involvement of youth in agricultural sector decision making to enable their increased
participation hence reducing unemployment rates among the youth.
ToroDev is made up of five professional staff members who are quite cooperative hence making my work easy and fun.
We have had a lot of staff motivational programmes like break tea, and lunch arrangements. Staff meetings have also been going on every Mondays of the week from 9:00am to 10:00am. The meetings are brainstorming sessions where staff members evaluate their perfomance in the previous week, their plans for the week, management issues and all the other businesses related to their work. The meetings have ensured timely delivery of internal communications, project reports, easy evaluations of project progress to reduce on staff conflicts. The meetings also act as reminders of the contract the staff signed with the organisation to ensure professionalism and implementation of projects based on the core values of the organisation.
M&E Officer Amanya Sheila
To ensure timely delivery of work, the organisation has also ensured that every staff has a computer fully connected with internet for easy internal and external communications and internet research.
The staff has been small and quite easy to manage, but with the new organisational arrangements to ensure self sustainability in cases of limited donor funding. ToroDev has started another commercial department called The Business Incubation Initiative which will be carrying out training, research and consultancies in entreprenuership development, Human Resources, ICTs, communications and public relations among others. The Business Incubation Initiative will employ quite a big number of staff to do consultancies which will require a more empowered and bigger Human Resource Sub-Department.
In the 2011/2012 financial year, the organisation will send some of its staff for more trainings in research, project monitoring and evaluation, project management and accounting to its staff to ensure delivery of quality services to the target communities.
Monitoring and Evaluation
M&E is an essential component for is project which helps to understand what to monitor and to reflect progress against plan, provide field back, identify needed changes and improve work processes and objectives and evaluate any activity of the project needs to reflect the objectives of your monitoring plan.It’s a continuous process that the evaluator does through out the life of the project
Since the monitoring and evaluation docket falls under the department, it has been quite busy implementing the rural radio broadcasting for entreprenuership promotion project in the Rwenzori region districts. The project is supported by ToroDev and Stem van Afrika (SvA).
Under the project we have been evaluated by a highly professional institution called CAMECO based in Germany, who have been no nosense in ensuring that the project achieves its desired impact.
Conceptually monitoring and evaluation focused on monitoring the primary and secondary stakeholders of the project .
Geographically Monitoring and evaluation dealt with the primary and secondary stakeholders from Rwenzori region districts of Kabarole, Kyenjojo, Kwegegwa Kamwenge, Kasese, Bundibugyo and Ntoroko. In order to effectively monitor all the activities of the project, the evaluator formulated various objectives and questions to help in findings all the needful information from the primary and secondary stakeholders which include:
It was quite an interesting and challenging assignment which led to the formation of seven rural radio listenership clubs comprised of small scale entreprenuers (women and youth). The project has also established strong networks with all the eight Rwenzori region based radio stations and established strong linkages between rural radio listenership clubs and rural radio journalists for easy monitoring and evaluation and finally, impact assesment.
We havent been fooled by our shortterm achievemnets, we are continuing to carry out more monitoring and evaluation assignments for our project participants to ensure a well empowered community with quality skills to exploit all the available ICT tools like FM radio stations to acheive healthy entreprenueral goals.
In addition to our free community services, we have also commercialised our Monitoring and Evaluation services targeting both private and public institutions to ensure a healthy finacial sustanability of the organisation in times of weak donor funding for projects. Since ToroDev is a not-for-profit organisation, the profits got from the private consultancies will be ploughed back to the communities.
Monitoring and evaluation activities
The M&E team evaluated all the activities that were carried out in 2010-2011 which included the knowledge sharing workshops in October - November 2010 in all the seven districts of Rwenzori Region and the training of the rural FM radio journalists and listenership club leaders in the Region.
The Evaluation team interacted and shared with the primary and secondary stakeholders to gather their decisions regarding on the effectiveness of trainings and knowledge sharing workshops and the efficient use of rural FM radio stations to promote business of rural people especially the rural youth and women.
Efforts were also taken to assess inputs of the trainings and knowledge sharing workshops by interviewing the primary and secondary stakeholders. Out puts of the trainings and knowledge sharing workshops, out comes of the listenership clubs were also evaluated and monitored and assessment of impacts of activities carried out in the organization to the primary and secondary stakeholders.
All the above activities have provided a firm foundation to generate information for the next line of activities to be carried out in other project areas.
Expected outcome of the Monitoring and Evaluation activities
M& E team expects to assess the impact of the project to its primary and secondary stakeholders
M & E team also expects to evaluate the ,inputs, outputs and outcomes of the project
M& E team expects to find out if the activities and objectives are fulfilled according to the project plan
Future plans
To move to the community and interview the primary and secondary stakeholders on the impact of the project to their businesses
To monitor the on going radio programs of primary and secondary stakeholders on the different radios stations in Rwenzori Region.
One of the biggest challenges faced in trying to ensure better broadcasting for entrepreneurship development is employing people who are not fully qualified because professionals are so expensive.
However, we have tried to do on job training although not sufficient enough because of the limited resources.
Life FM Radio Manager
The civil society can help in more capacity building for rural FM radio journalists to ensure better entrepreneurship development.
To ensure continuous better rural FM broadcasting for Entrepreneurship Development, there is need for a forum for Rwenzori region FM radio staff for better information and knowledge sharing and access although it needs more monitoring due to competition among radio stations for audiences.
