RUYIGI March 18th (ABP) – All non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are called upon to and must respect their commitments and avoid lying in the implementation of their projects. The same NGOs are appealed to hire the natives of that province who have the capacity to help reduce the number of the unemployed people in the province, where some lament that most NGOs only hire staff from other provinces.
Those observations were made during an NGO coordination meeting organized by the Ruyigi governor’s office, with a view to improving the partnership between the administration and the NGOs, as well as the performance of those NGOs.
According to Governor Elie Bashingwa, that meeting came to correct misconduct and poor behavior of some NGOs that do not put their words into action in the implementation of their projects.
Indeed, he explained, some of them enter the villages of the province without registering and making their presence known to the local administration. Others make false reports to their supervisors and claim that they have carried out projects without having been on the field and without knowing the localities and target people supposed to benefit from their projects. Others spend their budgets in activities that do not correspond to the real needs of the people, while others increase their achievements for the sake of pleasing their donors when they do not correspond to the field reality.
For all those irregularities, the governor winks at the NGOs that assume to take responsibility for abandoning those bad habits, to learn how to respect their commitments and abandon the lies before they run sanctions. At the end of the meeting, representatives of both international and national NGOs expressed their satisfaction and declared their readiness to establish a transparent and strong partnership with the administration.
They positively appreciated that initiative to make a coordination meeting which is new to most of those representatives and which provides a foundation for the NGOs themselves, allowing them to know the field of intervention of each of them and to focus on the most needy areas and localities.
Another important point discussed during the meeting was the hiring process of some NGOs in the province. Several speakers during the meeting supported by the head of the Ministry of Public Service, Labor and Employment and the governor of Ruyigi talked about a number of the unemployed which continues to increase while the majority of those NGOs continue to recruit without taking into account the unemployment rate. Some public opinion openly said that most of those NGOs bring mostly staff from other provinces, sometimes even staff from their own families.
Governor Bashingwa reported that Ruyigi province has intellectuals with knowledge and skills in diverse fields. He suggested that those NGOs should take this into account in their future hiring to help fight against unemployment throughout his province. He also suggested that the tests and job interviews for NGOs that want to work in Ruyigi can be conducted with greater transparency and ease of transport to the candidates.
After noting that 24 NGOs are supposed to work in the Ruyigi province and that 2/3 of those NGOs operate in the communes of the Kumoso natural region and especially in Gisuru commune, those NGOs were invited to decentralize their activities to other communes to avoid overlaps.
