7. Capacity Building
Rural people have long been the worst educated, least organised, and therefore
least able to demand assistance through formal or informal structures. Yet their
ability to take charge of local government and to contribute to decision-making will
be critical to the effectiveness of rural local government. It is the states obligation to
create access to resources and to assist with access to programmes that promote
good use of resources through capacity building support.
Capacity building can be defined as support or intervention that empowers people,
communities or organisations to achieve their objectives. While training is
important, it does not constitute all of capacity building.
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Broadly, Rural People Need:
- Access to appropriate basic education for children and adults;
- Access to the National Qualifications Framework that will allow individuals to
build on previous education and skills through recognition of learning across
sectors, and will facilitate life-long learning by incremental pathways;
- Skills development and empowerment around effective assertion, organisation
and decision making, for involvement in local government and other community
organisations;
- Skills in planning, managing, monitoring and evaluating projects and in
ensuring that access is obtained to sufficient information for effective
decision-making;
- Real access to resources around which to plan and organise;
- Facilitation and mediation skills;
- Technical and entrepreneurial training in agriculture and other income-earning
activities;
- Access to knowledge of appropriate technologies;
- Access to financial and other support services;
- Information on rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (and the
rights of children), and access to legal assistance;
- Accessible information on the harvesting and conservation of the environment;
- Transparency and accessibility (including in language) in all dealings with
officialdom
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Effective capacity building requires the interaction of experience-by-doing, access
to resources, facilitation, mediation, and training. There is a need for state
assistance to increase the capacity of district and rural councils, and for those
structures to employ people skilled in facilitation and mediation to promote
organisational skills among rural people. The Pilot Projects for Land Reform are
one example of a Programme that seeks to build capacity. Participant groups are
required to engage in joint planning around a budget for implementation, one arm
of which is obtaining the assistance they need to plan well.
Capacity building for rural local government and the community organisations with
which it interacts will be critical to effective rural development. As RSCs come
under democratic supervision as District Councils they will have to reorient, widen
and extend their services. Rural people will want closer control over services
through the speedy devolution of delivery to primary local authorities. Devolution
to bodies with little experience and who are unlikely to secure bureaucratic
assistance will be difficult. The Local Government Training Board has started some
limited training of TLC councillors, but this is unlikely to have much effect in the
short term. Similarly, it is unlikely that traditional leaders have yet benefited from
such training.
Council officials also require training so that they can execute the decisions of
political office bearers effectively and efficiently. This will require core managerial,
administrative and technical competence, as well as attention to the organisational
culture, values and attitudes that underlie local government transformation towards
meeting the needs of clients.
Africans living in rural areas were denied educational opportunities to an even
greater extent than those in urban areas. Most rural schools are poorly resourced
with buildings, equipment, books and access to infrastructure such as electricity
and running water. Children usually walk long distances to school and class sizes
of 70 students are not uncommon. Drop out and repetition rates are high and a
large number of children do not attend school at all. Opportunities for secondary
education are restricted. Opportunities for childhood educate and adult education
are rare although the needs are immense.
Community schools in the former homelands were built with only a partial subsidy
of building costs from the state. The state provided teachers' salaries, books and
furniture. All other costs building maintenance, cleaning equipment, educational
resources, sports equipment, etc. - were paid for by the community. Given the
prevailing poverty, it is hardly surprising to find most schools in a wretched state
and consequently offering education of inferior quality. School committees, made
up of parents, have no real power to influence school policy. Farm schools were
built by private farmers, with building costs subsidised by the state. They provide
mainly for the children of farm workers, one of the poorest groups in the country.
Teachers' salaries are provided by the state. 'With few exceptions, these schools
tend to be even more poorly resourced than the community schools.
New policies for rural education
The major rural education issues facing national and provincial governments are
how to improve its quality to education, improve its quality and establish effective
democratic structures for educational governance. To redress past neglect of rural
education, there must be positive discrimination in favour of rural areas.
The Minister of Education has appointed a Committee to Review School
Organisation, Governance and Funding to review the state's responsibility for
education and such issues as how poor rural communities can become less
dependent on their resources or the goodwill of farmers for the provision of basic
education. The Committee will work within the framework of principles set out in
the 1995 White Paper on Education and Training in a Democratic South Africa.
Communities could, of course, still mobilise their resources to top up state funding,
but the important thing is for the state to fund basic education in rural areas fairly
and to achieve equity with urban areas.
Access to schooling must be improved to meet the state's Constitutional obligation
to provide basic education for all. This will involve building more schools and
classrooms to satisfy demand and expanding opportunities for secondary schooling,
adult education and educate. Improving educational quality also requires adequate
provision of stationery, textbooks and other reading material, decreasing the
teacher: student ratios, providing in-service training for teachers, strengthening
teachers' advisory services, and providing electricity, dean water and telephones to
educational institutions. Ultimately, education improvement is tied up with the
general economic upliftment of the rural areas. This will make infrastructure
improvements easier to achieve, improve the educational potential of children and
adults, help rural am-as to attract and retain qualified teachers, and improve the
health and general welfare of children.
All schools will have elected governing bodies of elected representatives of parents,
teachers, and (in secondary schools) students. Other important stakeholders could
also be represented. Other educational institutions, catering for adults,
distance-learners, pre-school children, or the community at large (e.g. libraries)
should also have appropriate governing bodies on which all the main stakeholders
are represented. This will require capacity-building programmes that will empower
participants by helping them to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for the
proper functioning of the governance structures.
Many national and provincial departments have begun, or are in the process of
beginning, capacity building programmes which:
- Provide training in sector issues. These reinforce the community's ability to
provide oversight to local government programmes through greater
understanding of legal and technical issues. An example is the training of
members of Community Police Forums.
- Reinforce community management of a resource. The Department of Water
Affairs and Forestry is providing training to members of Statutory Water
Committees.
- Support local community structure in the management of Community, Based
Public Works Programmes. Workers on the Community Based Public Works
Programme will receive training entitlements allowing them access to adult
education and training programmes. In addition, the Department of Public
Works will provide technical training in labour-intensive methods for contractors
and supervisors bidding for government contracts.
- Provide training for elected officials in local government. This is to ensure that
councillors learn to become effective in their new roles, through:
- the Local Government Training Boards;
- the National Capacity Building Programme, linked to the Masekhane
Campaign (which will also assist communities to engage with local government)
- Assist communities in preparing development project documents. The RDP's
Project Preparation Facility will assist CBOs to secure support for community
based development projects. Wherever possible, these offices should be placed in
local authorities, since they have the mandate to interact with communities.
- Provide training in technical skills. The 25 Industrial Training Boards accredited
by the Registrar of Manpower Training accredit private training institutions that
provide training in a broad range of skills, normally paid by the students or the
appropriate industry through levies, and in some cases with a government
subsidy under the Department of Labour's Employee Training Programme. The
Department of Labour also has a scheme for Training of Unemployed Persons
offered at more than 500 training centres country wide. This is fully subsidised
and includes a trainee allowance of R8 per day. There are 1300 courses, some
accredited, lasting between one and nine weeks. To add to these, a pilot project
is being launched in basic business training to allow those who have received
skills training to start small businesses. ESKOM also has a programme for
training and accreditation of electrical contractors during electrification of new:
areas.
- Provide vocational training. The SANDF has started a programme called the
Service Corps, with 5,500 trainees in 1995, and a planned expansion to ten
thousand people per year. A cabinet committee is investigating the possible
extension of the programme beyond the National Defence Force to incorporate
youth and the unemployed as a voluntary programme.
- Provide training in technical skills, and assistance with business training for
small, medium and micro-enterprise development. This will be one of the major
services provided through the Department of Trade and Industry's Local Service
Centres, which will become operative in early 1996.
- Provide training in support of land reform. The building has been identified as
the major requirement in the reorientation of agricultural services to meet the
needs of all South African farmers. The BATAT programme of the Departments
of Agriculture will provide training to farmers and others in the sector. Training
will include production methods, conservation and management of natural
resources, and market awareness.
- Provide training in support of land reform. The Department of Land Affairs is
setting up a wide range of training programmes in support of land reform to
ensure that beneficiary groups are able to use the land quickly and well.
Rural communities must mandate their local and district councils to demand their
fair share of funding for capacity building. It will be essential that applications
from community structures for NDA funding emanate from the local coordinating
committee if the funds are to be used to support capacity building that strengthens
local development initiatives. The funds allocated to the NDA are tied to a formula
that requires affirmative spending that favours poorer provinces, rural areas, and
women. The probable use of the funds will be to buy training and capacity building
from NGOs and the private sector. This is a major resource, and councils and
community structures are urged to apply quickly for funding for suitable training.
Provincial RDP offices will be able to direct queries to the correct channels.
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Rural people who wish to obtain funding assistance for capacity building, service
delivery or infrastructure development must learn the importance of obtaining and
using statistical information about themselves in their applications for funding. for
example, It is proposed in Section B below that children's nutritional status
becomes accepted as an indicator of development in rural areas. Rural communities
can insist through the local health authority that nutrition statistics are collected
and analysed regularly. NGOs working with rural people will do well to create
awareness of such indicators, and their strength in supporting demands for
assistance. This will also assist funding agencies to target assistance to the poorest
areas.
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