WATCHING A SERIES OF video clips in which beneficiaries of the Parish Development Model (PDM) programme explain their changed circumstances can be a confusing experience, even for a person like me.

On one day as I was watching a lady in Eastern Uganda talking about her small investment in poultry and some crops on her little home garden, someone walked up and propositioned me.

He was short of money and needed “just a little bit of assistance”.

We were in a nice coffee shop and restaurant in Kololo. I had finished a mug of coffee that cost me Ushs12,000, and was considering the lunch options.

The ‘assistance’ he needed was not significant, when thought of as part of a wide scheme of things. 

The problem he needed solving was also not significant, compared to what the lady in the video clip had been dealing with before she discovered the PDM programme.

Like most other beneficiary testimonies, she had stated how she had lived with zero hope of ever getting her children through school or having electricity run through her house as a regular feature.

Until she signed herself up for a government-funded programme in her locality.

Two years after she started interacting directly with government-funded programmes, and a year and a half into the PDM one, she was a different person.

When the President was delivering his Budget speech for 2026 the other week, he used his usual humour to tell the story of some Ugandans in the diaspora who were skeptical about these stories.

They made arrangements, most likely with the support of some clever people in the government, and were blown away at finding former peasants boasting of having become agricultural entrepreneurs within a matter of years.

Of course the logic of economics makes it difficult to believe that these people are ignorant peasants of the other day who take in months of financial literacy training and turn into commercial farmers, albeit small-time.

That is not the point.

Why is it that so many people with an education and even resources of a respectable nature are not doing an equivalent of this PDM?

If a peasant who has not been in the money economy can utilise a few chickens and pigs to start banking a couple of million shillings within a matter of months…

…then it should be abominable for a seemingly well-heeled fellow like myself needing to borrow a couple of hundred thousand shillings in the third week of every calendar month because “I am waiting for some ka-money”.

Hence the confusion when one is watching these video testimonials. The skepticism of those diaspora people was certainly understandable because of their own circumstances.

Two months ago I spoke with one diaspora person on professional kyeyo whose name I will not reveal here. He was even more confused by the situation, especially after computing how much he had been sending home to run the families of some relatives in Kampala AND “the village”.

If he had been running a personal programme similar to the PDM over the last five years alone, he reckoned, he would be a wealthy Venture Capitalist by now and not having to be employed in a nine-to-five job out there.

I believed him. And encouraged him to start doing something similar – but with the caveat that the Parish Development Model programme does not simply consist of cash grants or even loans for agricultural use.

Part of the issue with the fairly more-educated people who are already in the ‘money economy’ is that they have dependencies that start with their minds being set in a certain way – such as the monthly salary one people like me belong to.

Another is the arrogance we have when we hear about the success and modalities of such programmes – which the diaspora people President Museveni spoke about only overcame after buying air tickets and driving out to the villages.

This second part of the issue is certainly the easiest to deal with right now.

Where the PDM video clips provided answers for easy believers, they triggered questions from the skeptical.

Simply solution – take them into the parishes to see for themselves that this programme has worked not just as a tool of political mobilisation but to put money into the pockets of ordinary Ugandans.

The hope being that when they (we?) see for ourselves, we might drop our education-inspired arrogance and ‘invest’ in similar programmes for ourselves, by ourselves, to grow our wealth and this economy.