Methods for community education of the Parish Development Model in Kamwokya, Kampala Central.

Abstract

The President of Uganda initiated Parish Development Model, a Government strategy for organizing and delivering public and private sector interventions for wealth creation and employment generation at the parish level as the lowest economic planning unit. The overall objective of Parish Development Model is to increase the effectiveness of the interaction between the Government and its people, in order to accelerate the realization of Government’s long-term goal of Socio-economic transformation. The question was how education of the Parish Development Model was being done to enable people understand it? This research was majored on the education aspect of the Parish Development Model and most importantly methods used in helping people understand the purpose of the Parish Development Model. Findings of this study indicate that local community leaders and community members of Kamwokya parish were selected and trained on various occasions on how to make SACCOS and enterprises where Government would put money. This study therefore was designed to explore the learning experiences of community local leaders, trainers and community members during the Government trainings of the Parish Development Model. The study specifically focused on community members in Kamwokya, Kampala Central, the methods that trainers used to educate people about the Parish Development Model, the knowledge of community members about the model and the challenges that they faced during the acquisition of knowledge. A qualitative research design was adopted purposely to collect detailed information about the learning experiences of beneficiaries of the Parish Development Model education. In-depth interviews, observation and document review was used to collect primary and secondary data in order to describe, explore and understand different phenomena. Purposive sampling technique was adopted to represent the study. It is a non-probability sampling technique in which participants have characteristics needed in the study. The findings of this study revealed that trainers used lecture and group discussion methods mainly which were key in enabling participants to learn about the Parish Development Model. However, the majority of community members reported that they did not attend the trainings which made them have inadequate knowledge about the Parish Development Model.