The Portfolio Committee on Higher Education and Training this week had a meeting with two Sector Education and Training Authorities who appeared before the Committee to present their budgets and strategic plans for 2010/11.
The two were the Wholesale and Retail, and Agriculture Setas. During the meeting, the committee noted some disturbing facts from the presentations.
With regards to the Wholesale and Retail Seta, we found that there was a distortion on the spending of the mandatory and discretionary grant, which amounts to about R450 million.
The committee also discovered that about 50 percent of participants dropped out of the learnership programmes, and this, according to the committee, shows a lack of management solutions to reduce the dropout rate. Most of the money allocated to the mandatory grant is currently being directed to larger retail companies which constitute one percent of the industry rather than to smaller retail companies that constitute 99 percent of the wholesale and retail industry. This shows a lack of development perspective. The committee is of the view that this anomaly of the grants going to the larger retail companies needs to be corrected urgently.
We have further noticed an under utilisation of the discretionary grant, by the Wholesale and Retail Seta. The reason given by the management of the Seta was that people do not apply for the discretionary grant. This shows a lack of understanding of outreach responsibility by the Seta to the rural communities. It has shown biasness towards the Western Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces in allocating funds from this grant, which distorts the purpose of rural development.
As the committee we have instructed Wholesale and Retail Seta not to underspend in this financial year. We have also recommended that the Seta must develop strong monitoring and evaluation processes in the spending of the grant. We proposed that it should do this by, among other things, enhancing the capacity of small, medium and micro enterprises (SMME’s), Community Based Organisations (CBOs) and small training providers in the sector. The committee also decided, in three months time, to evaluate the positioning of the Wholesale and Retail Seta’s rural development strategy.
For enquiries or interviews with the Chairperson, contact:
Faith Kwaza (Ms)
Parliamentary Communication Services
Cell: 072 122 0371
Tel: 021 403 8062
E-mail: fkwaza@parliament.gov.za
