COMMENT: Train professionals for rural work

The professionals who can provide the listed services to rural areas, be they doctors, engineers, agriculturalists, and others, have all been brought up in urban settings. These professionals have lived an urban life and totally do not know anything about the rural life set up.

It should be noted that background and the environment shapes man.

With the above background our government should expect a lot of resistance of trying to convince the professionals to go and provide services in the rural areas.

If you visited the healthy facilities in rural areas that are in the most urgent need of the presence of doctors, it is very hard to find one on duty. This applies to agricultural extension workers on farms and teachers in rural schools.

Their absence is not because they majorly lack facilitation but because they are in an environment that is strangely new to them.

They may move up and down trying to find their level but ultimately they end up longing for the kind of life they were brought up in.

Similarly, a few professional from the rural set up might have to fight to cope with the upscale kind of living, but the main challenge is with those from the upscale kind of life having to take up the rural kind of set up.

Live examples also do happen in places where a new district is formed. It happens that the new administrators normally opt to drive back to more developed urban centres in other districts on daily basis rather than reside in the new district where they work. Sometimes, this is the main town in the former mother district. These officials do this because they are looking for facilities that are basically missing in the new place.

The government should, therefore, study this phenomenon and come up with a concrete solution. Some officers may think of simplistic solutions by advising government to provide electricity, vehicles, pay high salaries etc to the professionals. This may look like a solution but it is not a solution since the surrounding of the facility remains remote to these professionals.

Government solution should instead do better by focusing on developing mini-education centers in the rural areas and encourage the rural students to join for training. This is a long term solution but most practical. Nations are not developed in a short period; for any development to be meaningful, the population must take the lead and this shall never be short term.

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Alex Turihohabwe is the director Blessed Investments Ltd/Chairman UACE