Barry Streek A Cape Town-based NGO, Ikamva Labantu, which services more than 1 000 community-based projects, was saved from imminent collapse by the business community following years of government bureaucratic bungling in processing its funding applications. Ikamva needs about R150000 a month to operate, but is getting R8 500 a month from the government to cover the cost of salaries for a social worker and two auxiliary workers. “We were considering closing up in November, but we are happy a few people in the business sector came to our rescue,” says executive director Helen Lieberman, a volunteer who initiated the project 35 years ago. “We hope the government will take it on. We have the infrastructure in social welfare service delivery. We are effectively offering it to the government.” “Our main issue is survival. We have to. I know what we are doing is right,” says mana-ging director Sipho Puwani. “We do it on a shoestring.” Puwani, a University of the Western Cape graduate and a qualified attorney, gave up his practice in November 1998 to take up his position in Ikamva, which had been formally launched six years previously. In the year he joined the organisation it received R660 000 from the former Transitional National Development Trust, which invited it to apply again in 1999. But the trust “lost” its application – four times. “Every time I phoned they gave me a different reference number,” says Puwani. Despite being told they would receive funds from the trust last year they did not and would have collapsed if the business sector had not stepped in. This year the government and its agencies have delivered a measly R8 500 a month, despite Ikamva’s good working relationship with officials of the Department of Welfare and Population Development and their awareness of its plight. The National Development Agency has yet to deliver a cent to any NGO and the lottery millions for charity have not been allocated. The result is that organisations like Ikamva, which are delivering services that should be provided by the government, are battling to survive and many may be forced to close down. The more than 1 000 social service projects Ikamva services include day care and pre-schools, youth education and sport, access to medical and legal services, skills training for the unemployed and the disabled, rehabilitation and shelters for the homeless, rural development in the Cradock area, economic empowerment initiatives and Aids services. Since 1984 the number of day-care centres operating under the auspices of Ikamva has grown to 1 019, each catering for between 20 and 200 children. The programme reaches and feeds about 40 000 pre-schoolers a year. Since 1989 Ikamva has established five centres that can each accommodate 30 disabled children, but “the waiting list is lengthy”. The government chose Ikamva’s disabled children programme for a documentary on South African township children. Forty-five black men, women and children from all over the Cape Peninsula belong to Ikamva’s Western Cape Blind Association, which supports impoverished blind and visually impaired people. In its youth programme, which has involved more than 40 000 young people, Ikamva has encouraged and supported the establishment of life-skills programmes, sports, arts and culture, and career guidance. Among its economic empowerment initiatives is the making of black, soft cloth dolls, called the Unodoli (Oh, a doll!) project. This week, at Ikamva’s Woodstock headquarters, about 20 women were busy making the dolls for sale on the local, tourist and international markets. The doll-making is part of its Community Creations project, a training centre where the design, manufacture and marketing of products gives people entrepreneurial experience and opportunity. Ikamva has also established eight shelters to accommodate and care for vulnerable groups such as displaced people and orphaned children, reaching 700 people a year. In 1998, the year Ikamva received its one and only grant from the Transitional National Development Trust, the organisation received government recognition when it was selected as the lead partner in a pilot project to implement a new funding policy for social services in South Africa.
However, according to Puwani and Lieberman, the old system of welfare grants remains in place and while running costs are still being subsidised in the former all-white institutions this system had not been extended to projects in black areas. A “hopelessly inadequate” and academic University of the Orange Free State study has not resulted in any changes and agreement has yet to be reached on the pilot project, which also resulted in a number of task teams. The task teams are expected to be introduced later this year. Puwani says history built up NGOs to initiate social welfare projects and that background should be recognised by the government. Lieberman says the ultimate power behind the projects is the people and Ikamva’s projects are controlled by community committees. “We have submitted a business plan to pay for our running costs so that we can deliver in a more capable way,” says Puwani. “But we are still waiting.” Puwani also worries that the bureaucratic delays in delivery are creating apathy among the people. “Then, you create anarchy – and that is very worrying.”