Budget speech by the Gauteng MEC for Social Development, Kgaogelo Lekgoro, for the 2007/08 financial year

Honourable Speaker
Honourable members of the Legislature
Stakeholders in the non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
Officials in the Department
Distinguished guest in the gallery

Sartori says, "Inequality can be attributed to acts of God, equality can only result from the acts of men." What he actually asserts is that we may be at liberty to apportion blame to other forces than ourselves for inequality, poverty, disease. But the solution to these problems can only result from the acts of those who have a conscience.

When confronted with societal problems it is natural that citizens will respond differently. Similarly, in the political arena, we must go beyond political jargon and state exactly what we are doing to correct these problems.

I am mentioning this at the onset because what we are presenting today is a combination of what we tried to do and what we will do in this financial year to contribute to the solution of social welfare problems in the province. We are aware that in the parliamentary theatre the representatives of the people often fall prey to grandstanding and not telling the electorate how they will be part of the solution to the social ills that afflict the province.

Speaker, it is little over a year since the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) took over social security services from our province. We can say in hindsight, without fear of contradiction, that the migration of the said service to Sassa removed a burden from the province which in turn allowed us to fully examine the impact of our work in social welfare services.

This exercise revealed that we gave more attention to the important work of social grants, at the expense of rendering other important social services to the different vulnerable groups in our province.

It is important that we assume even more capacity to deliver in welfare services. We want to help build a province that embraces the character of a global city region. This policy shift will provide the framework for us to capacitate ourselves in order to be deal with any unforeseen social consequences a global city region will present.

In a global city region, those who were excluded for various reasons must begin to feel that the government is responsive to their needs and has the capacity to address their problems. We cannot for example have a city region that has no capacity to attend to early childhood development. We cannot have a city region that lacks the institutional and community development capacity to address problems of the elderly. In short we do not envisage a city region that only promotes the survival of the fittest.

Appropriate social assistance to those who are unable to support themselves and their dependants is a constitutional imperative. It is also a very important pillar of the broader Global City Region Strategy.

The elderly

On the elderly we can now say beyond the pension grants we have to a great extent, neglected services that are equally important in assuring comfort and better life for this age cohort.

This skewed rendering of services to the aged is a legacy of our apartheid past. The reality of the matter is that after many years of democracy, we have not redirected that skewed way of rendering services.

There are a little over ninety old age homes in the province. Ten of those are found in predominantly African townships. It is a fact of life that many of the elderly are frail and in need of professional attention that only that the old age homes can provide. So, if all was equal, no community should be without these facilities.

We have 135 luncheon clubs throughout the province where the elderly can gather during the day for different activities such as recreation, physiotherapy, counselling services and provision of nutritionally balance meals. Of the 135, only 27 are found in the townships where the majority of the province's elderly people live.

This attests to the skew distribution of resources which is a legacy we inherited from our apartheid past. But as we said earlier we can blame inequalities as a result of other forces beyond our control, but bringing about equality can only be as a result of our own actions.

To this end, the Department will in this financial year, extend the services rendered in the 27 luncheon clubs to cover all services required by the Older Persons Act, namely spiritual, cultural, medical, civic and social services.

We will also expand these services to Duduza, Wattville and Boipatong where none exists at the moment. In the next financial year, we will start building old age homes in our 20 poorest townships on an incremental basis from one financial year to the next.

As for existing old age homes in the townships we can only say at the very least, that the conditions leave much to be desired. Based on the needs assessment of each home, we will as far as resources allow renovate the most affected areas.

Children

The Premier, in his State of the Province address (SOPA) indicated that early childhood development (ECD) would receive priority in the province. There is empirical evidence that proves that early childhood development is a need and not a luxury.

Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that in the last 12 years we have not given due attention in this area. We have around 930 264 children between ages of zero to six years in the province. Yet we are only able to trace at the most 23 504 children that are currently under ECD programmes. Of this group, half of them are African children in backyard programmes that offer nothing more than child minding while parents are at work.

To make up for this, government will establish one ECD site in each of the twenty townships. We will train the ECD practitioners from those very communities. We will further consult ECD stakeholders in these townships to discuss the modalities of how these sites will operate. In the coming financial years we will incrementally establish these sites where we identify the need.

We will also continue to support crèches that were initiated by mothers in our communities. We will help them meet the required standard of a crèche to register and then fund them.

In our province we have 300 000 orphaned children, a significant number of them as a result of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. We have made inroads through our community home based care programmes. We now have to roll out these programmes in areas where they do not exist and offer a more comprehensive package of services that will bring more relief to other children who are infected and affected by HIV and AIDS.

The Department will continue to fund the hundred existing community home based care sites and rollout thirty new sites in this financial year.

Besides children orphaned as a result of the HIV and AIDS pandemic, indications are that there are more orphaned children who are equally vulnerable. Most of these children become an added burden to their immediate relatives. Their future depends on the capacity and ability of their immediate relatives to care and provide for them. They often encounter heavy odds while growing up and most do not end up in successful careers. It is my opinion as the representatives of the people, the Legislature must ensure that the state makes the necessary interventions to improve the lives of orphaned children.

On our part we take advantage of foster care as a statutory community based response to orphaned, neglected, abused and abandoned children. This intervention retains children in families and communities as opposed to placement into institutional care.

Last year we made an undertaking to the legislature that the Department will break the backlog with regard to foster care. I am happy to report that we have succeeded. To date, 47 075 children have been placed under foster care. Realising that there will be an increased demand as a result of the HIV and AIDS pandemic, we have positioned the Department to avoid the recurrence of backlogs and to finalise each case in no more than six months. To that end we have set up dedicated teams in regions and funded all subsidised social work posts in the NGO sector.

We have 9 578 children in residential care. These are children in need of care, those who voluntarily left the streets into shelters those in places of safety and in those in conflict with the law. We continue to fund 58 NGOs that cater for 5 000 such children in their facilities. This financial year we will increase subsidy per child from R1 300,00 to R1 600,00 per child.

We have picked up a worrying trend, our statistics show that the number of children in conflict with the law is on the increase. During financial year 2004/05 there were 10 239 and in 2005/06 we had 16 359 youth in conflict with the law. This indicates the need to pay more attention to elements of the government's social development strategy on vulnerable groups with particular emphasis on children.

We will continue to offer children who are receiving child support grants a comprehensive social package under the Bana Pele Programme. For the rest of this financial year we will roll out the automation of the single window system to the rest of the province. This will enable the child who receives a child support grant to gain access education and health services without having to go through another means test. Besides benefiting children, this programme benefited 688 unemployed women in sewing projects through the production of school uniforms.

As the numbers of children living on the streets increase, the Department in partnership with its stakeholders will embark on a comprehensive program to respond to their plight. This program will be underpinned by a research study to determine the cause and extent of the problem and what the appropriate interventions should be. One of the main objectives of this programme will be to promote the re-unification and preservation of families.

People living with disabilities

Despite the development of a comprehensive legal framework for the provision of services for people with disabilities, they still face extreme levels of social exclusion, poverty and discrimination. The majority of people with disabilities and their families are therefore depending on social grants for survival.

The government's Social Development Strategy fosters an integrated inter-departmental approach in partnership with persons with disabilities to ensure that the challenges facing them are addressed. This relates to the physical environment in terms of housing, roads and public transport, health services, access to public buildings etc.

Besides issuing disability grants, the Department subsidises 35 residential facilities which caters for 2 200 persons with disabilities. We have also increased per capita funding from R743 to R843 for person with moderate disability. For persons with severe disability, the grant has increased from R1 175,00 to R1 275,00.

What we should continue to examine is how our community development centres can deliberately put aside a quota for people living with disabilities and protect their environment in order to redress issues of exclusion and allow them an equal starting point.

Substance abuse

Our province is mainly an urban setting with large townships and informal settlements continuing to attract migration and in-migration. Through this movement we are recipients to younger people who finally settle alone in houses and face parenting challenges as they eke a living on daily basis. Single parenthood is on the ascendancy. High divorce rates continue to impact on children. Our labour market is unable to cope with the demand and results in unemployment. All this weighs heavily on the family structure. Once the family collapses under these conditions, the old and young turn to substance abuse as a relief.

Alcohol and dagga remain the dominant form of substance abuse. Those who abuse substances in turn abuse the old, women and children at home. Communities in turn are also threatened as ordinary residents suffer assault, mugging, theft and rape. It has been reported that some car hijackings and gruesome robberies were committed after the perpetrators took some of the more illicit drugs.

Our substances abuse programmes are still dominated by awareness content. The challenge has been to develop programmes that are mainly preventative and to deliver treatment services to the doorsteps of where the majority of those who abuse substances live, namely the townships.

To promote our prevention programmes we will in this financial year put together programmes on early detection and referral in schools. We will also establish five local drug action committees in each region to co-ordinate prevention programmes within communities.

There are 19 fully-fledged treatment centres in the province with none in the townships. Since the advent of democracy we have been able to establish 12 satellite centres in the townships. In addressing this skewed delivery of services, we will on an incremental basis build capacity in the township satellite centres to cope with all daily and referred patients.

Abuse of the elderly, women and children

Abuse of women remains a feature that dents our democracy. We say so because their continued abuse begs the question, do women like their men folk enjoy the full fruits of this democracy. The traffic of children in our places of safety tells the story that children also continue to be victims of abuse. To a lesser extend we also have reported cases of abuse against the elderly.

This is a societal issue which speaks to norms and moral values that our communities should uphold. The great Mother Theresa said, "We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty."

The Department will continue to provide shelters for abused women and children provide girl child empowerment programmes and services to abused older persons and those living with disabilities.

Community development centres

Our community development centres are an attempt to respond to the government's social development strategy of maximising the capacity of the individual, the family or household and the community to participate productively in society.

Programmes in our community development centres are designed to implement integrated development projects that facilitate the empowerment of individuals, family members and communities towards sustainable livelihood.

Whilst we have provided skills training to individual community members through various projects, the challenge remains as to how we should enable these individuals to venture into the job market. We also face the additional challenge of increasing our skills training in communities. In trying to address this, we have isolated eighteen projects throughout the province that will serve as pilots. These projects will be given resources to grow, to take in more people and to promote their products in the communities where they operate.

I hold the belief that a better life for all will not be judged by the wealthy few; nor will it be judged by the emerging middle class, but by how we brought the millions of poor families to the mainstream of the country's social and economic activity.

Partnerships

Partnering with organs of civil society is the cornerstone of an effective developmental approach. Through partnerships, communities learn to become self-sufficient.

This is the background against which we partner with NGOs. We would like NGOs to impart project management skills to communities where they are offering a service. This will help to empower the community onto manage, operate and sustain a project by themselves.

This approach will assist in correcting what is otherwise an anomaly in black communities. There are few strong and anchored NGOs in these communities. As a result most of the services we offer are either rendered by an NGO mainly from outside on an outreach approach or there are no services at all. If we are guided by a developmental approach in delivering our service, we will be able over time to build more NGOs and capacity in these communities.

I am happy to report that we held a successful summit with the NGO sector in our province to discuss challenges we are facing and the way forward. The summit arrived at resolutions, which we were mandated to act on and report back to the next summit in twenty-four months. On our part we will continue to do everything to nurture this relationship.

The Department is aware that the private sector is injecting a lot of resources into communities. A more co-ordinated integrated strategy will reduce duplication and fragmentation of resources. The Department will therefore enter into a partnership with the business sector to maximise the impact of their contribution towards service delivery priority areas.

Gauteng Social Development Strategy (GSDS)

The GSDS is a strategy for sustainable development that will uplift our common humanity, reduce poverty and contribute to a more secure, equitable and prosperous province for the people of Gauteng. The GSDS will be implemented by all social sector role players in government, in collaboration with organs of civil society.

To this end the Department is charged with operationalising political and administrative structures to implement and oversee the strategy. Technical committees will develop business plans, which will be ready for submission to Treasury towards the end of the second quarter. We will continuously produce annual progress reports on the implementation of the strategy.

Human resources

This Department is committed to investing in human capital and as a result we have developed a scarce skills strategy, which has paid dividends in the recruitment and retention of social workers.

As a component of this strategy, a revised salary model was introduced for social workers employed by the Department which resulted in an average increase of salary from between 20% for entry level to 40% for more experienced staff. The subsidy for salaries and number of social workers in the NGO sector were also increased. This brought some parity between the salaries offered in the global market and improved the quality of life and financial position of our staff.

We believe that the dramatic reduction in the turnover rates compared to past years is as a result of this intervention.

We went a step further and provided them with tools that would remarkably improve their working environment. We have moved them from a paper based environment to having access to computers and internet connectivity. We have improved their mobility to allow for two social workers per car. We continue to work on ways and means of improving their mobile communication.

In his SOPA, the Premier indicated that the tertiary education of 200 young people who wish to enter the social work profession will be sponsored to augment the shortage the province is currently experiencing. For the current academic year, the Department has already sponsored 188 young people to pursue social work degrees. We have also taken 400 caregivers through a two-year social auxiliary work course offered by an accredited academic institution.

Management information system

Our people are experiencing delays in service delivery because of the Departments' paper based environment, which results in loss of documents and slow access to information. In order to address this problem, the Department is currently implementing the integrated social care solution which will greatly improve how we manage our information systems.

In addition, management will benefit from improved planning and informed decision-making around the allocation of budgetary resources. The monitoring and evaluation of services delivered will also improve. This initiative is an extension of a broader enterprise resource plan driven by the Gauteng Shared Service Centre (GSSC), which already includes procurement and finance modules.

The first phase will focus on casework management, community development, departmental residential facilities and records management.

Monitoring and evaluation

The Department is implementing a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation system that will integrate policy performance management, organisational performance, programme performance and individual performance. This will be supported by baseline information that will enhance decision-making and guide the Department's strategic management process. To this effect the Department developed a proposal to build capacity which would strengthen macro monitoring and evaluation on a strategic level.

The Department transfers 48% of its total budget to NGOs. This reality imposes on us the responsibility to improve our capacity to monitor NGOs to ensure that what they deliver is worth the taxpayers' monies we transfer to them. We need to monitor that they deliver within the prescripts of the Public Finance Management Act, the Non-Profit Organisations (NPO) Act and the Policy on Financial Awards. Resources have been allocated for the establishment of a unit to monitor NGOs both at a central and regional level.

Speaker, let me in conclusion quote John Stuart Mill when he says "the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people is a measure of good". I believe that the manifesto of the African National Congress (ANC) in its popular clarion call is within these confines when it espouses "a better life for all". In our own humble way we hope that we are contributing to this ideal.

In pursuit of this ideal I recognise the role played by the Department under the stewardship of Mr Bheki Sibeko, the portfolio committee under the leadership of Mr Steward Ngwenya, political organisations in the legislature and organs of civil society led by NGOs.

I thank you!

Issued by: Department of Social Development Gauteng Provincial Government
19 June 2007