Nabbanja: Errors in records have delayed Covid cash for many

The Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja has said that mismatches in people’s data have greatly affected government’s effort to provide Covid-19 relief cash to vulnerable groups.

Nabbanja said that in the process of verifying beneficiaries information, gaps were found in their official records while some had errors, which has affected the program timelines.

Nabbanja made these remarks while addressing Parliament on the government intervention response measures on Covid-19.

“In the process of verifying beneficiaries, we found that some of the people’s telephone numbers were registered under different names from those on their National Identity numbers,” Nabbanja said.

“In other cases, beneficiaries submitted telephone numbers that are not registered with the telecom companies. Such gaps and inconsistencies have caused delay and affected the exercise.”

Nabbanja said that as of 4:00pm on 20th July, 2021, a total of 413,504 beneficiary records had been submitted to the bank and paid which represents 82.5 percent of the targeted population.

At least Shs. 41,350,400,000 has been paid out of the earmarked Shs 53.4 billion.

The prime minister revealed that out of 501, 107 requests for Covid relief, 87,603 records have been found faulty and rejected for the time being.

According to Nabbanja, these did not pass the verification requirements by telecom databases due to a number of mismatches.

She said the exercise had served as a learning experience for the government to invest more In collecting, analyzing and documenting data about the citizens accurately.

“This is the first time government is carrying out an intervention of this nature, in a short time and in such magnitude. Therefore, challenges are bound to happen, we shall do better in similar programs.”