The Gauteng provincial government has narrowed its focus to the acceleration of strategic economic infrastructure developments aimed at catching up to the mass in-migration that is placing the province’s social services under strain.

The province on Thursday committed R240-billion over the next three years to develop social and economic infrastructure, including quality public transport, the reengineering of South Africa’s most populous province’s spatial framework in new human settlements, mainstreaming township economies and providing quality healthcare and education.

In increasing the number of people who received quality social services, the provincial government could “lift hundreds of thousands” of Gauteng residents out of poverty, Finance MEC Barbara Creecy said during the tabling of the province’s Medium Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS) on Thursday.

Gauteng, which was already home to 12.91-million and boasted 24% of South Africa’s population, held the nation’s fastest population growth, which would be about 2.6% in 2015.

The City of Johannesburg had the largest share of the population at 36.4%, followed by Ekurhuleni at 25.7% and the City of Tshwane with 24%, with district municipalities, Sedibeng and West Rand, accounting for 7.5% and 6.5% respectively.

“Gauteng remains an economic hub and a nerve centre of commercial activity in our country, contributing about 35.7% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in South Africa and about 10% to the GDP of Africa. The provincial economy will grow by 1.7% this year, above the national average, and [is] projected to reach 4.3% by 2017,” Creecy commented.

The province recorded a steady improvement on socioeconomic conditions and quality of life for its citizens, including the decline of income inequality from 0.66 to 0.63, and the Human Development Index exceeding that of the nation in 2013.

Despite the gains made and the significant contribution Gauteng made to the country’s GDP, the provincial economy still had “major” structural challenges, including the exclusion of a large number of the black population from meaningful economic participation and ownership, and a high unemployment rate.

Creecy stated that infrastructure was important for both service delivery and job creation.

“We will spend more than R32-billion on public infrastructure over the medium term. If one combines the joint spending of both provincial and local spheres of government in the Gauteng City region this amount rises to R94-billion,” she said.

Better planning and coordination between different spheres of government on infrastructure priorities would be encouraged to ensure that funds allocated to infrastructure were used to the benefit of Gauteng.

“It cannot be acceptable that capacity challenges in departments continue to result in underspending on these programmes,” Creecy said.

The province planned to “double efforts” to eliminate wasteful expenditure owing to cost escalation, project scope changes, lack of planning and weak project management.

The recently launched open tender process pilot, aimed at mitigating some of these challenges, would promote greater fairness and probity in the allocation of tenders and ensure greater value for public money.

There would be effective monitoring and evaluation of implementation processes and a “proper evaluation” process put in place before the issue of tenders.

“The open tender pilot is one of a set of measures we are adopting to promote multiyear infrastructure planning, budgeting and implementation,” Creecy concluded.