Community Work Programme
The Tekera Peso and the Community Work Programme were the pivotal
features on which the Centre was founded. TRC believes that handouts
create a welfare culture and so the Centre has never provided services
for free. However, many people in the village and surrounding
area cannot afford to pay for health and education services with Ugandan
shillings.
In order to give real worth to the services offered by the centre, a
local currency was developed by TRC when the centre opened. The Tekera
Peso looks and is used as real money but has no monetary value. The Peso
is earned by working at the Centre, through the Community Work
Programme. The Community Work Programme aims to develop a real sense of
community ownership of the Centre and to ensure that services are not
taken for granted.
The Work Programme is organized so that people can work on the community
farm, maintaining the centre compound or designated area in the
community such as road repairs and earn 1 peso per hour or task
(equivalent to 500 UGX). Pesos can then be used to pay for services at
the health clinic and for adult education classes. Some have traded the
Peso locally in exchange of goods like sugar or salt.
The Community Work Programme and the Peso took some time to establish,
as initially the centre operated on a ‘promise to work’ concept which
was difficult to manage. The Clinic actually closed down for a week in
April 2006 because the concept of the Work Programme was not working.
The founders of TRC sat down and brainstormed ways to make the CWP more
effective and from this, the Tekera Peso was born. The Centre has since
worked hard at maintaining the value of the peso by continuing to be
strict about peso payments and ensuring that pesos are only awarded to
those who have worked one full hour.
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