By Our Reporter
If there is any champion in fighting poverty amongst Ugandan youth then it is Hon. Frank Tumwebaze, the minister for Gender, Labour and Social development.
We have learnt that Hon. Tumwebaze, who is also the former minister for ICT and National Guidance, last year started up a goat farming project for youth in Kamwenge district known as ‘Empana’ (Take a Goat Give A Goat), which is already bearing fruits.
This is because several youth have already benefitted from the project whereby many of them started rearing goats at their homes, which they sell to earn money which they in turn use to set up other projects.
Over the weekend Hon. Tumwebaze interacted with some beneficiaries of the goat farming project, who took goats last year and had brought the offspring for other youth who enrolled in the project this year.
While commenting about the exercise, Hon. Tumwebaze, tweeted thus; “One yr ago, I initiated a youth goat rearing project , dubbed #Empano (Take a goat Give a goat) for the out of school youth in the constituency starting with my home neighbouring villages. The #Empano programme is a social loan. U get a goat,u return a goat after 1 yr…”
He added that “I donated initially 25 goats from my farm to the 1st Cohort. Today, each returned a goat as per the #Empano protocol. This means each member of the 1st cohort has fully paid his/her loan. I added on to the 25 of recovered goats another 25 to make it 50 for the 2nd Cohort…
It was my pleasure once again to handover today a total of 50 goats to the 2nd cohort of 50 youth farmers from the other villages. If the discipline continues with this 2nd cohort as was with the Pioneer one & we recover all the 50 goats next year, we shall launch the 3rd cohort of 100 beneficiaries next yr in March.
Then, we plan to register our CBO & start to fundraise for more scale-up. Very impressed with the youth discipline. May God continue to bless & reward their efforts to build.”
