Deepening Democracy in Uganda

Development thinkers and practitioners have pondered over community participation for the last four decades. For instance the current social and economic movements, NGOs and CBOs are a manifestation of community participation. In order to increase management efficiency and accountability, improve equity and justice for local people many development agencies and institutions have strongly advocated for community participation. The major reasons behind community participation include ensuring efficiency and empowerment. In Mbarara Municipality, community participation has acted as a way of deepening democracy in various ways such as regular voting of local government officials, involvement in project initiation, implementation and evaluation and budget conferences. However, community participation as a way of deepening democracy has experienced many challenges such as political peddling, political gate keeping-elite capture, corruption high illiteracy levels, little local resources and political market imperfections All these challenges have at times affected service delivery in Mbarara Municipality, thus needing to be addressed.

Autorentext

Rogers Bariyo is a lecturer, Associate Dean, Faculty of Development Studies,Mbarara University. He taught at Kampala International University and Uganda Management Institute. Bariyo has taught at university level for over a decade, done substantial research in local governance, service delivery. He has recently completed a PhD at MUST.