The government’s chronic inability to spend education funds at its disposal continues to disadvantage poor learners and communities in particular.
This emerges from A Review of National and Provincial Education Budgets 2005, released by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) last month. The review aims to assess ”the potential and real impact of these budgets on poor learners and learner communities”, writes Idasa researcher Russell Wildeman, and it relies on Treasury and Department of Education data.
”The termination of two indirect poverty grants in 2003/04 brought to an end a reign of deeply unsatisfying actual spending,” Wildeman argues. These were grants for Thuba Makote, a rural school building programme, and for Ikhwelo, an adult basic education and training (Abet) initiative.
Both grants were badly under-spent over their three-year implementation period, the review says. For Thuba Makote, R125,6-million was available in total, but less than half (R56,5-million) was used. ”Absolutely poor levels of spending prevailed” in the first two years of the grant, the review says: 1,9% in the first year, and 27,2% in the second.
In the final year (2003 to 2004), the education department removed R20,4-million from the total allocations ”because of its own projected inability to spend all the available resources”, Wildeman writes. Treasury regulations stipulate that grants not spent are not rolled over. As a result, ”large sums of money were … forfeited due to the inability of the Department of Education to plan and properly spend allocated resources”.
A similar fate befell the grant for the adult literacy project Ikhwelo, which tackled the links between illiteracy and poverty.
The Mail & Guardian reported in April that the department, USAid and the NGO Project Literacy successfully piloted Ikhwelo from 2001 to 2003 in Limpopo and the Eastern Cape, but that the Treasury’s grants for the national rollout of the project had been inexplicably underspent. Wildeman’s analysis now provides precise figures that highlight ”lost opportunities for the poorest of the poor adult learner communities”.
The project received voted allocations of R25-milliom, R40-million and R50-million for the 2001 to 2003 financial years. In the first year of the rollout, a mere R5,7-million was spent. Consequently, as with Thuba Makote, ”a significantly large amount [was] removed [in the second year] due to capacity problems” in the education department. Even so, only R2,3-million of the then available R13,1-million was spent.
Spending in the third year soared — R46,3-million of the available R50-million — but this was mainly because half the grant for that year was transferred to four Setas. ”We have not been able to obtain information on what happened to this portion of the funds,” Wildeman writes.
The education department confirmed to the M&G that it had underspent on both grants, and that unspent funds were returned to the Treasury. Regarding Thuba Makote, the department cited several factors that hindered implementation: rainy weather delayed construction in some provinces and building materials were not delivered on time, for example.
With Ikhwelo, ”the low spending trend … was due to a delay in some of the mechanisms that had to be put in place”, and ”there was a lack of capacity when the project commenced”.
The M&G also asked the department whether it had plans to address what appears to be a problem of underspending on Treasury grants for specific purposes, but the department did not reply to this.