Too little, too late was the response to the announcement that the Transitional National Development Trust is
finally to begin work, Rehana Rossouw reports
MILLIONS of rand earmarked for education programmes have been held up by the failure of the Transitional National Development Trust (TNDT) to set up shop.
The TNDT was established in October last year to facilitate the flow of funding to NGOs and community-based organisations (CBOs). It took until this year for the trust to set up an office, and it now promises to open its doors for business only at the end of February.
Meanwhile, classes have been terminated while grant agencies set up infrastructure for the TNDT at a snail’s pace. Nearly 10E000 pupils have been affected by the delays
The idea of the TNDT was first mooted in 1994 by Reconstruction and Development Programme minister Jay Naidoo after wide consultation with the NGO Coalition, the CBO Network, Nedlac and grant organisations Kagiso Trust and the Independent Development Trust (IDT).
Naidoo announced that the government would allocate R50-million to the trust, in tranches of R10-million, after a business plan was submitted. The plan was handed to the RDP office in December and the TNDT said this week it expected a first cheque of R10-million within days. A contract securing R75-million from the European Union has also been finalised, but that cheque has also not yet
The 21-month delay between mooting the idea of the TNDT and the organisation opening its offices has angered NGOs. The national director of Sached Trust, Roy Williams, said the delay in getting the trust off the ground did “not go down well”. It was unimpressed with the announcement that the TNDT had found offices and was hoping to get a telephone installed within days.
Sached applied for funds from the TNDT in September last year, via the IDT. It has not yet received a response to its application. “We understood the TNDT to be an emergency fund and we had an emergency in September,” Williams said. “We are now facing the situation where we will be curtailing programmes reaching 800 of our learners by February 15. Many other organisations across the country are facing a similar situation. We estimate about 10 000 learners nationally will be affected.”
Williams said Sached had attended a conference convened by Kagiso Trust and the RDP office at the end of 1994 where NGOs were told they must get in line with new parameters if they wanted to qualify for funding. These largely entailed restructuring organisations to make them more
Sached accordingly undertook a “painful” process of retrenching about 100 staffers and increasing efficiency.
“On the other hand, the grant agencies like the TNDT, Kagiso Trust and the IDT have taken a leisurely approach to setting up infrastructure. While we got our act together at great personal sacrifice, they took almost two years to get their act together,” Williams
IDT communications director Jolyon Nuttall said these accusations were “unfair”. The 17- member board of the TNDT had met twice since October where they had to finalise funding criteria, categories and principles.
“You can’t organise a meeting of 17 people overnight, the board was assembled with full consultation with NGOs and CBOs, and they also agreed on its size. Its work was also affected by the government recess over Christmas,” Nuttall said.
He said the IDT had seconded two senior executives to begin sorting out the funding applications the TNDT had already received which were in excess of R200 million. The absence of infrastructure had therefore not delayed work. “The TNDT will definitely be in a position to issue the first grants to organisations in March,” Nuttall said.