Articles 163 of the Constitution of the Republic of Burundi and 142 of the Rules of Procedure of the National Assembly of Burundi stipulate that one of the missions of the National Assembly is to control the Government actions. It is in this perspective that the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs at the National Assembly conducted 8 days of visits to the five regions of the country, namely: the northern region, the central region, the western region, the eastern region and the southern region, to assess the adequacy of the village cooperatives’ projects in relation to the Communal Plans for Community Development (PCDC in French acronym).

Implanted on all the villages of Burundi with the aim of boosting production in order to embrace the vision of the President of the country centered on the slogan "that every mouth have food and every pocket money", the Government has deemed it appropriate to encourage the population to group themselves into cooperative societies at the village level in order to ensure sustainable community development. Initiated since 2019, the village cooperative societies have started to work with an interest-free credit of 10 million Burundian francs each, granted by the Government.

These raids began on Monday, January 23, 2023 and ended on January 31, 2023. The Honorable Members of Parliament of the Finance Standing Committee went to the above-mentioned regions to meet with the leaders of the village cooperative societies. The methodology of the assessment consisted of a survey questionnaire and an interview to determine and highlight the projects already implemented within their entities and the profits collected.
Some gaps were raised; some cooperative societies do not manage to identify the appropriate sectors of profitable activities, which leads them to go bankrupt, whereas the loans contracted should be invested in the agro-pastoralism. Nevertheless, it turned out that the population that went into other areas recorded remarkable profits.
Other losses are due to irresponsibility, climate change, lack of selected seeds in some regions, unsuitability of selected seeds to the region where they are sown, lack of skilled veterinarians, capital insufficiency, delay/scarcity of agricultural inputs, lack of arable lands but also lack of market for their harvest.

In the meantime, the committee that carried out that assessment is on a 10-day retreat to exploit and analyze the responses of the respondents in order to draft the survey report of the results that will be presented during the subsequent plenary session.