President Thabo Mbeki announced the introduction of community development workers to accelerate government service delivery when he gave his State of the Nation speech on February 14.
”The government will create a public service echelon of multi-skilled community development workers who will maintain direct contact with the people where these masses live,” Mbeki said, explaining that the government should not oblige people to come to it.
Cabinet bodies are now considering a conceptual framework document that determines how and from where community workers will be recruited and what their role within the government will be.
Early suggestions that they be closely associated with local government appear to have been dropped. Community development workers are expected to be local people who help provincial and national departments bring their services to the grassroots. One area they could be involved in is the drive to register all children younger than seven who are eligible for the R160 child support grant. They could also help inform communities about where and how they can access government services such as housing and business start-up assistance.
The community development workers would receive a stipend.
Their role harks back to the heyday of the Reconstruction and Development Programme before 1999, when several ministries employed workers as liaisons between communities and the government. The initiative was driven by NGOs.
On Freedom Day Mbeki reiterated that the corps of community development workers would soon be in the field to ”assist our people with various problems of housing, welfare, health, development, education, safety and security, and many others”.
The community development workers are being cautiously welcomed.
Adam Habib, a political analyst at the University of Natal, said they should be welcomed if their purpose was to provide people with information, to act as ”networking agents” and ”hook them” into government services. But they would cause concern if they became propaganda tools or if they came under the control of local political elites such as councillors, traditional leaders or warlords.
The risk of political abuse could run high as the lines between the state and political parties are increasingly being blurred, Habib said. ”You do not want to recreate and duplicate structures of the state because one [section] is not doing its job.”
Training community development workers would be a great challenge, but would give the government an opportunity to form partnerships with the NGOs in an area where NGOs have long been active, said Eugene Saldanha, director of the Non-Profit Partnership. He said that there was no need to develop an infrastructure to support more government bureaucracy, particularly because South Africa had a rich history of NGO activism and volunteerism.
The National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union, which has often been at loggerheads with the government over the restructuring of the public service, said it was ”not hostile” to the idea of community development workers because a transformed public service implementing Batho Pele (People First) was in everyone’s interest.
The idea of community development workers came after the government’s imbizo in Gauteng in October last year. There the president experienced the effects of lack of government services on poor communities — and himself registered a small girl for the child support grant.
”I believe we must closely examine the issue of multi-disciplinary community workers further to bring the government closer to the people. The poor do not have ready access to the government,” Mbeki later wrote in ANC Today.
The concept was again raised at the African National Congress national conference in December, when Mbeki called for the strengthening of the public service ”deployed in the field to maintain direct contact with the people at their residential places”.
Mbeki said these workers would be ”public servants who have been properly prepared to carry out such tasks as community development, other service delivery such as provided by the community health workers, agricultural extension services, adult basic education and so on”.
Since then the planned community development workers have been compared with China’s barefoot doctors, who in the late Sixties brought primary health care to rural residents. About two million barefoot doctors — able to handle situations from snakebites to delivering babies — were funded by cooperative medical schemes into which each family they treated paid money.
By the Eighties inadequacies surfaced and in recent years Chinese rural health workers have been allowed to establish clinics that they run as small businesses.
In the United Kingdom, New Zealand and elsewhere, community development workers are an established institution, acting as mobilisers for communities to bring social, economic and political influence on the government. They also ensure that government services are tailored to specific needs and they act as a link between ward councillors, local communities and public services.