Uganda’s poor children and families will have access to basic needs once the Commonwealth countries are able to raise over $4b (about Shs14 trillion) to run “The Child Support Grant”, the First Lady and Minister for Education Janet Museveni has affirmed.
Launched on Tuesday at Speke Resort Munyonyo during the ongoing 9th Commonwealth Youth Ministers Meeting, the funding supported by UNICEF will pull resources from all over the world to enable disadvantaged families especially in West Nile and Karamoja engage in useful ventures that will help them better their day-to-day livelihood and sustain the children in schools.
“We need to start employing young people at a young age to get better citizens. As Uganda we thank the Commonwealth and are very positive that The Child Support Grant will have a very big impact in nurturing our children, offer them improved wellbeing and will achieve happiness in their older lives,” Ms Museveni remarked during the high-level meeting on children alongside Patricia Scotland, the Commonwealth Secretary General youth ministers from commonwealth countries and international envoys. Delegates pushed for a new model for empowering families and communities to care for the children.
“As government we may have to think about this programme and how we need to strengthen it and fund it with a lot of our funding support that is scattered across the youth programmes that may make an impact than we are doing so far,” she said.
Mrs Museveni added that with new financing initiatives to children, Uganda will dramatically accelerate its social economic development at the household, community and national levels.
“We must therefore find a way to get this innovative financing initiative off the ground and attract the four-billion -dollar principle investment required. This will ensure that grants are provided and sustained until 2040 and beyond,” Kataaha noted.
The families will receive a monthly stipend from this fund, Jaya Murthy, the chief of communications at UNICEF Uganda told TheUgandan at the sidelines of the historical youth meeting.
About four million children under the age of five in Uganda live in poverty and are deprived of basic rights according to a 2014 report on Child Poverty and Deprivation by the Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC).
