Mandate Of The Department

The mandate of the department is to carry out activities towards social development in the areas as derived from the Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, The Local Government Act Cap 243, The Social Development Investment Plan(SDIP),the National Youth Council Policy, The Uganda Gender Policy, The Domestic Violence Act 2010, The Children Act, The Labour Act 2006, The Disability Act 2003,Orphans and Other Vulnerable Children Policy, The Culture Policy and other legal instruments issued from time. Other provisions include international instruments such as CEDAW, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the International Convention of the rights of the children

         Composition

The department is composed of the following
i)   Community Development and Functional Adult Literacy 
ii)   Probation and Social Welfare
iii)   Youth and Child Affairs
iv)   Women and Gender
v)   Social Rehabilitation
vi)   Labour and Industrial Relations
vii)   Orphans and other Vulnerable Children (OVC)
viii)  Support to women, youth and disability councils

         Services Rendered By Probation And Social Welfare

Providing psychosocial support to 58 survivals of GBV and 33 children beyond parental Undertook legal representation for 25 children in contact with the law. 

Tracing and resettlement of 20 abandoned/missing children since the family is the best place for children.

Provided life-saving emergency care for children whose survival is at risk; 13 abandoned children received food and nutritional support, 13 transferred to alternative care facilities including 3 sexually abused children. All these services require reasonable funding but we have limited funds as indicated in the table above.

         Challenges

• Understaffing has the department is operating below 50% of the required staff
• Juvenile justice as remained a challenge as the remand home is not yet operational. There need to recruit staff namely the social worker and the guard to make it functional
• There are many programme areas that pose a challenge to a few staff to handle as the staff establishment of 2 staff at sub county level has not been realized due to lack of funds to fill the gaps.
• Short term projects have not created a big impact and yet the department has no money to sustain projects started by other partners.
• The Gender based violence programme only targets 4 out of 16 LLG hence the coverage is small.
• The elderly have not been funded to date yet they have good programmes which would require special grants like the PWDs.
• The youth and women do not have development grants that are special for them.

         Policy Interventions

Need for resource allocations to operationalise the remand home since the structures are complete though Ministry of Gender labour and social development has kept silent on the way to make use of them and their funding modalities. The district has to incur big costs to transport the juvenile offenders to Kampiringisa or Jinja who have been put on remand

Need to allocate more resources in staff recruitment and training. The department handles several programmes yet the staff is small. Each sub county is supposed to have 1 CDO and 1 ACDO to be effective in handling all the departmental mandates yet we have 1 staff for the sub county and other sub counties do not have any of the Community development staff. Where they exist there is need to train them to be able to handle all the work in community development including women, youth, PWDS, Orphans and other vulnerable children, probation and social welfare, water and sanitation, Community driven development (CDD) and other assignments.

All pilot programmes like under the GBV programme be rolled over to all sub counties to realize greater impact

Special allocations for the elderly people and culture should be considered since the policies are in existence but have not been allocated resources to make the programmes functional.

Provide for special grants for development programmes for youth and women councils to enable them implement the youth programmes and women programmes as it is done with PWDs.