Question No. 10
Ms F E Khumalo (ANC) to ask the Deputy President:
To what extent has the government developed programmes that capacitate and empower households and communities to take themselves out of poverty?
Reply:
Honourable Members there are a large number of government programmes aimed at capacitating and empowering households and communities to take themselves out of poverty. Our programmes relating to education are but one example.
However, as a coordinated programme on poverty, government has developed the War on Poverty Campaign and the Comprehensive Anti-Poverty Strategy. The former is being scaled up to cover 1 128 of the most deprived municipal wards of the country by 2014 whilst the latter is currently undergoing consultation in National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) after receiving support from the National Anti-Poverty Civil Society Colloquium in December 2009.
The anti-poverty strategy focuses on the following nine pillars that seek to capacitate and empower households and communities to take themselves out of poverty with the help of government and its social partners:
- Creation of economic opportunities
- Investment in human resources
- Provision of income security to the most vulnerable members of society
- Provision of social and individual asset accumulation like housing, land, working capital and infrastructure
- Environmental sustainability
- Provision of social wage like subsidised electricity, water and sanitation services
- Provision of preventative and curative healthcare
- Social inclusion
- Good governance.
It will be seen from the nine pillars that the anti-poverty strategy uses most of the existing government programmes as key instruments. What is different about the anti-poverty strategy is that it:
- identifies the most deprived wards in the country using the Provincial Indices of Multiple Deprivation which has mapped all poverty areas in each province
- profiles the communities and households that live in those deprived wards
- collects and stores such community and households profiles into the national database
- develops referrals that it sends to national and provincial departments and social partners to address the needs of those households and communities
- advises national and provincial departments to develop service delivery plans that should be included in the municipal integrated development plans
- monitors and verifies the impact of service delivery performed by departments on the progress and graduation of households and communities out of poverty.
The War on Poverty Programme was piloted from 2008 to 2009 by covering a ward in each province. Cabinet in May 2009 called for the scaling-up of the programme to cover a total of 1 128 of the most deprived wards or a third of all the wards in the country by 2014; with an estimated 3 million households and an estimated 15 million people who live in extreme poverty.
I thank you.
Source: The Presidency
