Every week, the speaker presiding over Uganda’s 426-member parliament fields questions, comments, complaints, demands, and even threats regarding the uncertain future of Uganda’s elderly population, who have been left vulnerable after decades of difficulties.

Since 2010, some districts of the country have benefited from a pilot pension scheme that has helped not only the ever-increasing aged population, but also the families they are often responsible for.

But as the Ugandan government prepares to take over the full rollout of the program from donors, the future of the hugely popular intervention is in doubt.

“People have started becoming uncomfortable. They want to see the pilot pension scheme rolled out because of the many achievements they are seeing in the neighboring districts where it’s been implemented,” Alex Ndeezi, a former member of the Ugandan parliament and founding chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee on Gender, Labour and Social Development, told Devex. “That raised the pressure from the communities, who were demanding from their leaders, ‘why aren’t we getting our senior citizen benefit?’”

The Expanding Social Protection, or ESP, pilot, funded by the United Kingdom Department for International Development, Irish Aid and the Ugandan ministry of finance is a cash transfer pension scheme for Ugandans over 65 years of age. Launched in 15 districts in 2010, the pilot was hugely successful, praised by recipients and social protection experts for its far-reaching impacts on other vulnerable segments of the population. A study found that, on average, recipients spent 70 percent of their benefit on others in the household. Currently, 150,000 Ugandans receive the benefit, but evaluations have found that the $6.40 monthly payments impact between 600,000 and 700,000 secondary beneficiaries, mainly children.

More than 3 million orphaned children live with elderly people in Uganda, often grandparents who lost offspring to one of the country’s recent conflicts, economic migration, or the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In Uganda, Ndeezi said, it is customary for children to take care of their parents as they grow older, but years of disease and conflict have left older generations with more, not less, responsibility.

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Yet of Uganda’s 42 million citizens, less than 10 percent are covered by a formal pension scheme, raising concerns among lawmakers about soaring rates of old age poverty. In a new, still shuddering, democracy, the issue of social protection for Uganda’s elderly — as well as the vulnerable children in their care — has emerged as a key test of its electoral system. When the government delayed committing additional support to the program, Ugandans took it out on the polls.

“The community attributed the delay to their leaders not being able to represent them, so the pilot which had taken five years from 2011-2016, caused many members of parliament to lose their seats,” Ndeezi told Devex.

In 2016, after stellar evaluations of the scheme’s impact and value for money, DFID and Irish Aid expanded the pilot to 40 districts on the condition that the Ugandan government take over more of the financing and implementation of the $80 million program. The Ugandan ministry of finance initially balked, but under pressure from fearful members of parliament it increased its buy-in through 2021, which is when DFID and Irish Aid now plan to hand over the reigns to the government.