As part of its agenda towards enterprise development, community rehabilitation and public works, the Business Trust has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Public Works and pumped R100-million into the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), the trust’s chief operating officer, Brian Whittaker, said on Thursday.
The EPWP is the government’s large-scale programme of deriving services and infrastructure by means of labour-intensive methods. It uses existing public-sector budgets as part of the poverty-reduction agenda.
In acknowledging the threat posed by a lack of jobs and the socio-economic instability resulting from this, the trust has committed to working with the government to halve the unemployment rate.
“Unemployment is an imperative. Unless we work on this together as private and public sectors to address the question of unemployment, it will remain a major challenge. We have eight million unemployed people, we need to deal with this urgently,” Whittaker said.
The EPWP — officially launched in May 2004 — had by the end of September last year created 82 200 job opportunities, and the number of projects being implemented or completed was 1 518. The government has spent R1,4-billion out of the project’s R20-billion budget, which will be spent over the five-year period ending 2009.
Sean Phillips, the EPWP’s chief operating officer and acting Deputy Director General of Public Works, reiterated that the programme is not a panacea for eradicating unemployment and poverty but one of the elements the government is using towards the transformation of the second economy.
He concurred with Whittaker that business and the government need to collaborate to accelerate job creation while alleviating poverty.
According to Phillips, although the EPWP had a slow start, “so far, it’s meeting its targets and we expect it to accelerate over the next few years”. — I-Net Bridge