Barry Streek
The failure to integrate, particularly in delivery of rural development, between government and parastatals since 1994 is a major problem facing the government.
This assessment comes from an article written by development consultants David Everatt and Sifiso Zulu for the latest edition of Development Update the South African National NGO Coalition’ s quarterly journal .
The article is based on an evaluation of community-based public works projects funded by the Department of Public Works. Highlights of the article indicate inhibiting factors such as turf battles in and between departments and the failure of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) office to operate effectively.
The consultants also have reservations about the recently launched government Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Strategy (ISRDS) if it is fast-tracked because ”capacity needs at local level are enormous and cannot be provided overnight”.
”If the ISRDS is allowed to unfold slowly, so that lessons can be learned and amendments made where needed, it has a better chance of success,” Everatt and Zulu argue in their analysis of rural development programmes in South Africa between 1994 and last year.
They conclude that the government has failed to address the tension between community-based development organisations and the insistence on spending capital allocations within a given financial year.
Other problems identified include tension about the appropriate roles of provincial and local government in rural development.
Integration through cross-departmental collaboration was, at best, patchy with virtually no integration at the point of delivery. In certain instances the government has resorted to ”easy” building projects, such as community halls and classrooms, but restricted delivery of economically viable assets. There was a widespread failure to design, fund and implement a maintenance strategy for assets that had been delivered.
Many development projects are reported to have failed to provide training to large numbers of people, recruit significant numbers of youth, women and people with disabilities to ensure that marginalised groups got equal opportunities on projects.
The article reports that monitoring systems for projects are weak: there is an absence of a monitoring culture within the government. Even where monitoring had identified problems, there had been a failure to react to the problems identified.
At the heart of these problems is an absence of a mechanism for integrated planning, targeting, monitoring, information sharing and a central database providing accurate information to the government and the public.
”Monitoring has been an area of conspicuous failure for most anti-poverty and development programmes. Systems have been non-existent or have malfunctioned and have failed to provide adequate or accurate data; system outputs have not been analysed or are under-analysed; and some systems have been so high-tech that they would not work in poor rural areas.”
Everatt and Zulu said after 1994 many NGOs expected to play a prominent role as partners in programmes and some did, but many were bypassed in favour of private sector companies.
”In some instances, this reflected the institutional weaknesses of NGOs; in others, the government seemed intent on wooing the private sector at the expense of civil society organisations.”
In terms of communication, the government’s language is full of jargon and phrases that have lost meaning such as the ”ring-fencing” of funds; ”fast-tracking” development and the demand for potential partners to ”demonstrate spending capacity”.