HUYE – The Southern Province, under the Provincial Partners Forum, plans to assess the impact of Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and their projects located within the province, Jeanne Izabiliza, the president of the forum revealed.

The evaluation exercise comes after reports indicated that some organisations purporting to operate in the province have barely any form of presence in the region.

This has in turn given forth to accusations of such organizations being labelled as ‘briefcase’ NGO’s as such entities are not known to have tangible activities on the ground.

A recent evaluation exercise by Nyaruguru district revealed that eight NGOs that claimed to be operating in the district did not have any activity on the ground.

Izabiliza, who is also the Provincial Executive Secretary, said the May 11-13 evaluation exercise will be conducted in all the eight districts of the province.

"We want to properly ascertain the level of activities of these NGOs on the ground. One way of doing that is to get feedback from the local people on how the different interventions being championed by these organizations have benefited them,” said Izabiliza.

"We have noticed a tendency whereby many NGO’s are only concentrating all their activities in one area while others don’t exist on the ground at all. This evaluation will give us a true picture of the activities of such development partners.”

She added that the assessment also aims at bridging the gap between local authorities and development partners. "By so doing we will be able to give guidance accordingly be it among local authorities or even among these very organizations.”

The eight-member evaluation team will evaluate international and local NGO’s, their projects and religious organizations.

"One important thing about this evaluation exercise is that we will be able to identify the best practices from different organisations which can be replicated by others,” said Jeannette Ndawumariya, the vice president of the forum.

"The exercise is not meant to reprimand those who will be found wanting but to advise them on how best to carry out their interventions,” Ndawumariya.

Statistics indicate that there are 28 international and 45 local NGO’s operating in the province. This is in addition to 21 projects and 24 religious organisations which are engaged in different development activities.

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