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Elita Chikwati Senior Reporter
Government is set to improve on the registration of Private Voluntary Organisations (PVOs) to enable their smooth operation and monitoring by the State, a Cabinet minister has said.

Speaking in Harare yesterday, Labour and Social Services Minister Petronella Kagonye said PVOs owners had been experiencing challenges in registering their organisations, forcing some to abandon the registration process and operate unlawfully. She said this affected operations of the organisations while Government could not follow up on the institutions for monitoring purposes.

“Registration of PVOs used to take long, and in some cases years, but now we want to make sure that the process is shortened and within a week of application, the applicant should be able to trace the papers,” said Minister Kagonye.

“Some PVOs that have been operating were not registered because the people were not aware of the correct procedures to follow while some applicants did not follow up on their papers.

“This resulted in some PVOs operating without authority while others had to wait for years to start their operations.” Minister Kagonye said the ministry had a board that would sit to deliberate on applications and approve them. She said due to limited resources, the board, which was supposed to sit four times a year failed to meet and attend to the applications.

“In some cases, the board would meet twice a year and consider the applications and because of the bureaucracy some papers would not have been forwarded for approval,” she said.

“Now before the board sits, all applications should have been followed up and forwarded so that the board approves the applications. We have set time limits. We should not spend more than a week without processing the application. The board will also from now onwards, sit four times a year so that no application will take long to be processed.” Minister Kagonye said this was in line with President Mnangagwa’s directive to cut on bureaucracy.

“Improving the registration of PVOs will ensure more organisations register and we will be able to monitor their operations,” she said. “At the moment we do not know how some organisations are operating. Other organisations after failing to register as PVOs would go on to register as Trusts.

“Registrations will also help us in planning. We will be able to know how many organisations we have, their services and the areas of operations and this will enable us to rationalise. We will not have a situation where some areas have many organisations operating while others will be left out. There should be equitable distribution of resources.” Minister Kagonye said by registering PVOs, the operating organisations would be forced to stick to their mandate.

“We have some PVOs that are being used to beg for money and the money will not go towards the intended uses,” she said.