The Gauteng provincial government on Tuesday joined forces with the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Johannesburg to establish a research facility to help the province evaluate its performance.
The province said the think tank would develop a research-based approach to long-term strategic planning related to economic, social and other areas of development for the province.
Named the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), the initiative was expected to become a catalyst for cooperation between universities and
the government in various fields of scientific endeavour.
The formation of a GCRO was based on the fact that since 1994, the national spatial allocation of resources had focused mainly on social spending or infrastructural backlogs.
The key objective of the GCRO was to harness intellectual capital towards the achievement of the global city region objectives, including socioeconomic development.
Critical to the GCRO would be the benchmarking of the Gauteng city region against other global city regions worldwide and to develop objective indicators to measure progress.
The GCRO would be run by a board made up of representatives of Wits, UJ, the Gauteng provincial government and Gauteng municipalities.
The chairperson of the board is Professor Adam Habib, deputy vice-chancellor for research, innovation and advancement at UJ.
The deputy chairperson is Professor Belinda Bozzoli, Wits deputy vice-chancellor for research.
The observatory would be housed at Wits and the offices had already been established.
The GCRO was expected to help Gauteng lay a firm foundation for Vision 2014, which aims to halve unemployment and poverty in the province by 2014. – Sapa