Shs529b lands in parish SACCOs as PDM enters its fourth year

On the morning of 18 November 2025, Finance Minister Matia Kasaija told journalists in Kampala that Shs529b was on its way to the bank accounts of every verified Parish Development Model (PDM) SACCO in the country. Spread across 10,589 parishes, the release works out at Shs50m per parish — the first of two equal six-monthly tranches planned for the 2025/26 financial year, and the latest instalment in the government's single largest bet on cooperative finance.

The minister was unusually blunt about the conditions attached. The money, he said, was meant strictly for investment and production, not personal use, and — with the country heading into an election season — not for campaigning either. Beneficiaries were not to be charged any fee to access their loans, and Resident District Commissioners, District Internal Security Officers and accounting officers were instructed to act against fraudsters and extortionists who prey on the programme.

For SACCO boards, the message was equally direct: proper selection of beneficiaries, close monitoring and serious loan recovery are now the measure of whether a parish SACCO is doing its job.

According to the Ministry of Finance, Shs3.261 trillion has been transferred directly to parishes since the programme began, reaching 3.27 million Ugandans. The sectoral breakdown the minister gave is revealing. Roughly Shs1.1 trillion has gone into food and other cash crops, another Shs1.1 trillion into livestock — mainly piggery — Shs385b into coffee and Shs366b into poultry, among other enterprises.

In other words, PDM has become, in practice, an agricultural credit scheme delivered through cooperative structures. That makes the parish SACCO the most important rural financial institution many households have ever dealt with, and it places a heavy governance burden on volunteer boards that were in many cases formed only in the last three years.

The scale of the need is not in doubt. When the programme was launched, an estimated 42 percent of Ugandans were living in multidimensional poverty, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics' 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index. Citing the 2024 National Population and Housing Census, the Monitor reported that PDM had reached 832,746 households three financial years into its rollout, while about 3.5 million households — some 33.1 percent of the population — remained in subsistence.

PDM was designed as a revolving fund: borrowers repay into their own parish SACCO, which lends the money on to the next household. Godfrey Ssemugooma, the Accountant General, put the repayment figure at Shs650m at the time of the announcement — a small sum against the trillions advanced. He stressed that repayments do not return to the Treasury but stay in the parish to be lent to other members, and urged borrowers who had passed the two-year mark to begin paying back.

That distinction matters for how cooperators should think about PDM. Every shilling that is not repaid is not a loss to government; it is a loss to a neighbour in the same parish who is still waiting for a loan. The cooperative principle of member economic participation is, in this sense, written directly into the programme's design — but only if members and boards treat it that way.

The government also signalled that the flat Shs50m allocation is about to change. Because the programme began before the 2024 census, densely populated parishes, particularly in urban areas, have received the same amount as sparsely populated rural ones. Mr Kasaija said larger parishes would receive more — he cited figures such as Shs300m — from the next financial year.

For 2025/26 as a whole, the government has allocated Shs1.097 trillion in new capital and facilitation for PDM. The bulk is for the Parish Revolving Fund itself, but smaller lines show where the administrative pressure points lie: Shs5.3b for SACCO administration, Shs4.2b to cover loan withdrawal charges, Shs4.7b to support persons with disabilities, Shs10.6b for parish development committees and Shs12.7b in facilitation for parish chiefs and town agents.

Those administrative lines are modest compared with the capital being pushed through the system. Whether Shs5.3b is enough to keep more than 10,000 SACCOs properly managed, audited and reporting is a question the movement should be asking loudly. A parish SACCO with Shs50m arriving every six months, and little money to pay for bookkeeping or training, is a governance risk waiting to happen.

The release is welcome news for households waiting in the queue. But the next phase of PDM will be judged less by how much is disbursed than by how much comes back.