Monday, 7 April 2014

FIGHTING CORRUPTION FROM THE GRASSROOTS


The MYANK Anti Corruption Coalition (MACCO) was awarded UGX, 139,719,000 through the IDF general call window to implement the Citizens advocacy on Rights and Development project from June 2013 to July 2015.
This project is working to have improved livelihoods of the poor women and youth through enhanced participation and responsive governance in Arua District.  The project has adopted the use of community monitors to track service delivery in target government institutions (health, education and water) facilities in the four sub counties of Arua Hill, Adumi, Rigbo and Odupi. At the time of conducting the baseline survey, findings established that indeed the community feels very disconnected from government as one Villager explained, “people are not well informed about the services being provided and in any case there is nothing to receive.” To address this MACCO is implementing a project aimed at ensuring active participation of women and youth in decision making and local governance. Already a number of achievements are being realized as indicated below.
Increased vigilance and interest of communities in improving  education service delivery and reporting cases of poor service delivery (case study of Anyara Cope centre)
During the routine monitoring and spot checks by community monitors, the communities of Anyara Cope school raised concerns about the poor quality of the education accessed by their children as this persistently  featured in most monitoring reports by the community monitors. As a result, the team paid visits to Anyara Cope school to validate some of the issues raised by the community monitors in their monitoring report and the findings were shared with the sub county and district officials to enlist the commitments and responses.  
The team comprising of the District technocrats (District Education Officer & councilors) came up with action points for all the stake holders to address the challenges in the school and ever since then the education officials have scheduled field visits to further assess the magnitude of the issues for appropriate intervention and are now aware of what is happening in this school.