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{
    "id": 976501,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/976501/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 263,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Nairobi CWR, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. (Ms.) Esther Passaris",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 12475,
        "legal_name": "Esther Passaris",
        "slug": "esther-passaris"
    },
    "content": "I was recently in India and I visited the Entrepreneurial Development Institute of India. The Government of India, which is a very good partner to this country and is willing to come and set up an entrepreneurship institute or partner with one of the institutes here - and I am working on that - says that before you start lending your population money for business, you have to understand your market. You have to create clusters. You can say that this particular region should grow this crop and this other particular region should produce this. That way, you can enhance the economy and find people markets. So, as a Government, we should not just lend people money. We should lend people money, train them in financial management, create clusters for them and create markets for them. We have got manufacturing and food security as some of the President’s agenda. That is a market in itself. You can lend money to the people and tell them: “Look, we are lending you money and this is how we want you to invest.” At the end of the day, you will be able to get returns on investment. I know that Master Card in conjunction with Equity Bank have been trying to train our youth to help with food security through greenhouses. They asked the youth to make a small investment of Kshs40,000. Then they would train them in greenhouses and then they guarantee buying their produce. They give them a greenhouse that is worth Kshs800,000. Then they buy the produce from them. So, sometimes, we need to understand the education levels and expertise of those that we lend the money to. There are also people who have learnt how to capitalise on Government funding. And you find that we are recycling and giving the same people funding. So, there is a bit of corruption as well. If you look at the lack of recovery, you will find that the committee members who do not get paid any money are expected to come to office and vet all those applications. You can rest assured that the majority of them are vetting applications by themselves or using relatives or friends. So, there is not going to be recovery. That is why corruption creeps in. We need to ensure that the people that we appoint as committee members are actually compensated for doing that job. I appointed the members of the Uwezo Fund committee in Nairobi, but I have never seen them. I have never been called for any of the Uwezo Fund meetings. But I know for a fact that when disbursing the money, there could be a good percentage of the cheques that are going to members of the committee and their family members. So, it is not about serving the people. When I organise civic education and I invite the representatives of the Women Enterprise Fund, Uwezo Fund and the Youth Fund, I ask the question: How many of you have ever received money from Uwezo, Youth or Women Fund? There is nobody. So, I ask: Who are they lending this money to? I think there is need to also put a lot of money on monitoring and evaluation. The Government has to find a way of making sure it monitors and evaluates the Funds. It took me a long time to get the NGAAF projects up and running in Nairobi because I needed to make sure that everybody I was giving the project money to actually existed. I actually found out quite a number of them do not exist. When it comes to bursaries, you will find a college that is getting so many bursary applications and when you go to that college, those students do not exist and neither is the college active. It is a college that has been registered, but has learnt how to capitalise and steal from Government. Corruption has infiltrated most of those firms. Whether you are a Member of Parliament, Woman Representative or just an official sitting in an office and have been entrusted with Funds, you have to do something substantial to help people. Managers of the Youth Fund decided to buy hatcheries - quite a number - to the tune of about Kshss250 million. Those hatcheries are sitting today at Kasarani in a storage. The Youth Fund has paid for them, but they will never be used because they are substandard. Nobody has been The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}