April 1, 2005
By Thomas Thale
JOHANNESBURG is the first municipality in South Africa to adopt a policy to systematically fight poverty.
The recently adopted Human Development Strategy, the first such intervention by a municipality in the country, commits the City over the next ten years to adopt measures to alleviate poverty, provide opportunities, and to help develop the potential of all its residents.
The strategy, says Prema Naidoo, the mayoral committee member responsible for health, underlies the City's commitment to ending poverty and ensuring a high quality of life for all. Naidoo also chairs the human development sub-committee of the mayoral committee, which guided the development of the strategy.
The strategy dovetails with the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, adopted in 2000 by 191 countries, and is aligned with national and provincial strategies for fighting poverty and promoting human development. The signatories to the UN declaration committed themselves to eradicating poverty, increasing literacy, promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/Aids and malaria and ensuring environmental sustainability by the year 2015.
The Human Development Strategy pivots on three major concerns:
- safeguarding and supporting poor and vulnerable households;
- championing their rights and opportunities; and
- building prospects for social inclusion.
These strategic directions are designed to "build an approach within the City that responds to the imperative of developmental local government. In this, the emphasis is on building and consolidating some of the existing initiatives in the City, and on outlining new directions for optimising human development", Naidoo says.
A strategic use of resources
Census 2001 found that just over half of Johannesburg's households subsist on R1 600 or less a month, although this figure probably excludes social grants. The situation is further compounded by population growth.
But Kirsten Harrison-Ali, a specialist on human development in the city, is quick to point out that the poor are not homogenous and that poverty in the city is fluid. It "requires the City to channel its resources in strategic ways if it is going to make an impact on poverty".
"We have great wealth in the city, but it's unequally distributed. We want everybody to be a fully fledged citizen. We therefore need to identify and remove what is keeping people back," Harrison-Ali says.
Naidoo ascribes this dire penury to the legacy of apartheid. "It resulted in inequality, poverty and the social exclusion of the majority from social and economic resources. The strategy is intended to address these conditions by bringing people into the economic and social mainstream."
The overall aim of the strategy, says Naidoo, is to improve the quality of life of all Joburg's citizens.
As information on the safety nets becomes more easily available and awareness spreads, under the Human Development Strategy more people could seek access to the social package offered by the City and the social grants from the provincial government.
Consolidating City policies
Rashid Seedat, the director of corporate planning in the City, says the Human Development Strategy seeks to consolidate existing City policies and programmes on poverty.
The City's commitment to poor communities has been expressed "through free basic services, primary health care, social and recreational services and facilities made available".
But these interventions have been carried out in a disjointed fashion, Seedat says. "We found that we have not had an overarching approach which allows us to catalyse our interventions. We aim to systematise the council approach to poverty alleviation. The strategy recognises that the Constitution gives all citizens access to individual and socio-economic rights. The strategy will allow us to look at what we do through the lens of a rights-based Constitution."
Harrison-Ali says that to implement the strategy, the City will partner with the private sector, community organisations, non-governmental organisations and other spheres of government in projects to promote human development.
Putting programmes in place
Various programmes will be developed in the upcoming months in accordance with the strategy. "We will pull together a multi-departmental task team to facilitate the implementation of particular programmes in departments," says Seedat.
The City already has facilities that can be used to disseminate information on social grants and on the City's social package, according to Harrison-Ali. Other areas of intervention could be in Early Childhood Development, assisting women in the informal economy, building sustainable human settlements and enhancing health and security.
"In terms of Early Childhood Development, which is a priority, we will explore ways of working with facilities in low income areas where children are not getting access to a comprehensive Early Childhood Development service," she says.
The programmes will be cross-departmental efforts targeted at people who are chronically poor and can barely survive in the city as well as those who may not realise the opportunities available to them in a city that is full of opportunities, Harrison-Ali says.
The political driver of the strategy will be mayoral committee member Christine Walters, who is responsible for community development, roads and parks, Naidoo says. "But every department has to champion it." Implementation will be co-ordinated from the corporate planning unit in the office of the city manager.
All City departments will have to make provision in their budgets to complement the strategy, Naidoo adds.
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