Some government departments are helping to break the poverty cycle
Angela Field
Last year James Mlawu’s team although he sees himself as part of the team, not its leader won the top Impumelelo Innovations Award for the KwaZulu-Natal government. Since then delegations from all tiers of government and even from the United States have come knocking on his door.
“Winning that award was a big advantage for the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Transport that initiated the project and the provincial government,” says Mlawu, who is KwaZulu’s chief director of strategic planning.
“The Zibambele Road Maintenance programme set out to create jobs particularly among female-headed rural households in a truly innovative way and this was recognised by the Impumelelo judges.
“Now that project is being replicated all over the country in fact it has become a national project and it is quite likely this wouldn’t have happened, or might not have happened as quickly, had it not been for the award.”
The programme gave destitute rural families jobs repairing gravel roads. With 17 000km of roads throughout the province in need of repair, the department dished out wheelbarrows and spades, showed the women what to do, allocated them a strip of road about 600m long, and paid them R31 a day for a 60-hour month. For households dependent on subsistence farming the cash income was in many cases a life-saver.
Perhaps more significantly, the principle behind this project is now finding new applications.
Says Mlawu: “We’re discussing the possibility of adapting the principle to cleaning a township street, for instance. Once again you could target a female-headed household where the income is minimal and pay them to keep the street litter-free and the gutters clear. All it takes is some innovative thinking.”
For Mlawu the Impumelelo awards are a major factor in stimulating creative ideas within government.
“We can’t just sit back and be civil servants,” he says, “we’ve got to apply our minds. And right now, from where I sit I don’t see enough of this happening.”
Perhaps the 216 entries from government departments that were submitted for this year’s awards are some indication of how seriously the three levels of government are beginning to take them. This is the highest number of entrants since the awards started in 1999.
However that no projects from Mpumalanga, Free State and Northern Cape made it into the list of finalists is a disappointment to Rhoda Kadalie, executive director of Impumulelo the name is from the Xhosa word that means “success through working together”.
“My objective is to have all nine provinces represented among the finalists,” says Kadalie. “In just two years we’ve noticed that the competition is getting tougher and the projects we’re seeing reflect some cutting-edge thinking.
“Obviously it is gratifying to receive so many entries and encouraging to see that government departments regard the awards as significant and prestigious.
“But even more important, each entry represents a positive and innovative project that government has initiated in the long and often untold process of rebuilding the country.
“Also, when the pervading perception tends towards doom and gloom, Impumelelo is there to remind us that government can enable people in the most desperate communities to take control of their lives.”
Started in 1999, initially under the auspices of the Institute for a Democratic South Africa, Impumelelo became autonomous in 2001 with a new board of trustees, each well respected for their commitment to the eradication of poverty.
Funding came from the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation of South Africa, Sida, and USAid, Shell, and with Impumelelo, a non-profit organisation, set about giving recognition through the awards to public-sector projects and public- private partnerships that were creative in their efforts to reduce poverty.
“We believe that government is primarily responsible for delivering social services,” states Kadalie. “But it doesn’t have to provide these services alone. Often effective partnerships between the public and the private sectors can make a huge impact on supplying and improving services. Impumelelo aims to reward these initiatives and maybe through this process an idea will be picked up and implemented elsewhere in the country.”
This year R100 000 will be awarded to the overall winner, while the next nine exemplary entries will receive R60 000 each, and a further five R20 000 each. Other promising ventures will be awarded R5 000 each.
Among the entries to the Impumelelo 2001 awards are a food garden project in Tembisa organised by various departments in the Gauteng provincial authority as well as NGOs; a vibrant business partnership between Durban Metro, the City of Pietermaritzburg, Vivendi Water (the principal water utility in France), Umgeni Water and Mvula Trust (an NGO) focusing on new ways of providing sustainable water and sanitation services to urban and peri-urban poor communities; an Aids project undertaken by Cape Town Unicity and the Western Cape; a job-creation project initiated by the Department of Trade and Industry and Port Elizabeth municipality examples of what Kadalie calls “successful projects breaking the poverty cycle”.
“Increasingly, the most enterprising provincial and local authorities are spending their money in a way that draws in the unemployed, the youth, the disabled and single mothers struggling to feed their children.
“There are many truly innovative ventures going on around the country making a real difference to poorer communities. And behind these ventures are public officials taking risks to find new solutions to old problems. We need to give them recognition.
“And we need to find ways to inspire government to replicate some of these exceptional projects on a much broader scale.”