The government has ordered that over 10,000 non-government organizations (NGOs) must cease operation with immediate effect after they failed to adhere to the validation process within the stipulated time.
The state minister for internal affairs Mario Obiga Kania urged all the stakeholders to cross check the status of any non-government organization with register on the website or with NGO bureau to ensure that these organizations do not operate in any part of the country.
“All NGOs which don’t appear on the validated register should stop operation immediately, stakeholders especially the sub county and the district NGOs monitoring committees, the financial intelligence authority ,Uganda police, banks, hotels and other sectors should cross check the status of any NGO with a register on the website,” he said.
Addressing the journalists at the media Centre on Wednesday, Obiga said the affected NGOs are those who did not yield to the cause of validation in the one month that started from August to September this year.
However with validation exercise which ended on 7th September, only 3810 NGOs are operating with valid permits while 10397 have invalid permits.
Below is the distribution of NGOs which were validated ,1635 were indigenous, 254 foreign,205 international, 7 regional and continental 17 .
“All NGOs must align their programme with sub counties and with district and they must report their presence in the operation in those centers,” he said.
He explained that some of these NGOs failed to meet the deadline because of the ignorant of the validation exercise and some of them didn’t have the required information.
However, the minister said NGOs with valid permit can go to the NGO breau and have them verified.
“NGOs which did not validate their existence by the close of validation deadline and they are in possession of the valid NGO permit should proceed to the NGO bureau and fill in information we request for before added on the validation list,”he said.
The exercise is aimed to weed out non government organisations with scrupulous ,obscure and unclear operation that are damaging the reputation of the NGO sector.