Weekly Mail Reporter
RURAL advice offices play a pivotal role in community development and it would be “development suicide” if donors withdrew their funding, said Mpho Ndebele, director of the Social Change Assistance Trust (Scat).
She was responding to a report in the Mail & Guardian last week which said Eastern Cape advice offices were either closing or faced closure as their funding dried up.
Continued support of rural advice offices was essential if the Reconstruction and Development Programme was to reach the rural poor.
“Forcing these community organisations to close down amounts to development suicide. Beacons of hope in the otherwise often hopeless, impoverished and forgotten rural areas, where the majority of voters live, are about to be extinguished at the very moment when the government has publicly committed itself to the development of these areas.”
Scat has given more than R4-million to 71 organisations this year — 40 of them rural-based advice offices.