TASAF beneficiaries cautioned against misuse of funds

AMBROSE WANTAIGWA in Tarime

According to Antony Magoti, the TASAF District Coordinator, the project aims at contributing to building the foundation for graduation out of poverty by enhancing household’s abilities to support themselves through strengthened and diversified livelihood benefits paid to households enrolled in the plan throughout the region.

Magoti was addressing hundreds of beneficiaries that are enrolled to receive the funds at Pemba Ward where he reiterated the need for the relevant households that are benefiting at the moment to abstain from lavish spending and instead focus on banking on the Basic benefits that are provided by the state without any conditions.

Explaining, the coordinator revealed that there are different provisional criteria during the execution and selection of the genuine receivers at family level, ranging from benefits which require households with children and pregnant women to comply to the conditions of attending school or clinic and wage for one member of the households enrolled who participates in public work projects improving infrastructure, environmental protection and other listed conditions and terms. He said a total of 130 registered households in the ward received 4.4m/- meant for enhancement of livelihoods and increasing incomes.

“The basic component in the package provides support to community driven interventions which enhance livelihoods and increase incomes through community savings and investments as well as specific livelihood enhancing grants,” he noted, and added, “Although we give out money we aim to train the beneficiaries to save money to invest in livelihood enhancing activities, by supporting these investments with business development skills and technical training.

Additionally, this component provides grants to existing functioning Community Savings and Investment Promotion Groups or savings groups to enable the groups to consolidate and further build upon the efforts they have already made to improve livelihoods and progress out of poverty,” He said TASAF conforms to norms and standards and ensuring adequate and timely technical support including being non-partisan and apolitical, which ensures predictable and timely transfers transparency and clear demonstration of community empowerment focusing on graduation from poverty.

According to the area ward TASAF treasurer Alfred Masase, some of the enrolled members are not conversant with the project’s guiding principles of operations that are demand-driven and follow a bottom up planning and decision-making approach that finances beneficiaries and community-initiated projects directly.

“Some of the registered members were developing a negative tendency towards the project, that the whole exercise was meant to benefit special members of the society especially the well-to-do and failed to take an active role in ensuring cooperation to participate fully in village gatherings where the legitimate beneficiaries are identified and selected,” he said.

Mr Masase noted that all households identified as being poor and vulnerable and targeted by the common targeting system are eligible to a basic unconditional transfer whereby they will receive this transfer alongside any other support for which they are eligible