MPUMALANGA PROVINCE: SUBMISSION TO SOCIAL SERVICES

THE SELECT COMMITTEE

ON

DATE: 13 MAY 2003

PRESENTED BY N J MABILO HEAD OF DEPARTMENT

1. VISION

A dynamic department promoting integrated developmental social services for all.

2. MISSION

To promote integrated social development for all, through the provision of social welfare, social security and development in Mpumalanga.

 

3. Departmental priorities for 2003104

· Fighting poverty and HIV/AIDS and ensuring that programmes are expanded and have greater impact. (R42 million provided)

· Ensuring that all citizens who are eligible for social grants are reached. The overall growth of the social security program further necessitates that attention be given to improving the delivery mechanisms using the national norms and standards as a basis. (R2.2 billion)

· Protecting our children as constitutionally mandated and services to children need to be strengthened. (child and family budget R29 million)

· Building partnerships with local government, non-governmental organizations and business to deal with development challenges in an integrated manner.

· Improving departmental performance through improved office efficiency and management of finances.

· Strengthening of service delivery through the establishment of integrated delivery teams at local level.

· Transform the delivery systems, including services rendered by non governmental and community based organizations and continue with efforts to reach people on farms and in rural areas.

4. Expenditure trends and budget allocation for 2003/04

The efforts of increasing the equitable share that we experienced over the past two to three years is appreciated. For the first time during the past year we became equitably funded. New NGO's could be funded and existing once could for the first time since 1997 have increases on subsidies. The only area of concern was the fact that the increase is mainly targeted to social grants leaving other social services less funded. The result is that we remain far from 80 - 20 ratio of social grants to other services.

The 2003/04 budget allocation is also reflecting the trend. The R367 million increase on our budget is mainly for the extension of CSG and grant increases. We are however not complaining and we think that it is a credible budget.

5. Pushing Back Frontiers of Poverty

Facts revealed through Imbizo's and departmental outreach meetings with the communities show clearly that we are still far from winning the battle of poverty alleviation.

Among the poverty stricken, you continue to find children and adults without ID documents in the deep rural and farm areas. These are people in dire need and grants to them are direct interventions. To minimize this problem, we arranged with Department of Home Affairs and we hold departmental outreach Imbizo's with Communities together with them. As we register beneficiaries for social grants they also register them for ID documents.

The improvement made in reaching all who qualify and the increases made on these grants are no doubt impacting significantly on alleviating poverty.

As a province we expanded our services through the use of traditions authority offices for registration of grants and registration of birth and death as well as registration for ID documents. This we did together with the Department of Home Affairs and we utilize the services of supernumerary officials in the provincial government.

Our poverty alleviations interventions are focused at:

· Public Education on services offered.

· Training of community development facilitators.

· Training of projects.

· strengthening existing poverty alleviations initiatives. Monitoring an evaluation of projects.

The emergency food security scheme has revealed the extend of poverty in the province. It is clear that with the amount allocated the demand will not be met. Mpumalanga is characterized by a large number of small poverty pocket spread through out the province.

6. CHALLENGES

6.1 Coping with the increased demands of increasing social grants in terms of:

· Demands related to conditions at paypoints.

· Demands of Human Resources to cope with increasing numbers and timeous registrations.

6.2 Ensuring that the benefits go to the people intended and that they are utilized for the intended purposes. This includes fighting fraud and educating our communities to ensure that grants are being used properly.

6.3 Ensuring an equitable distribution of resources to other services than social grants.

6.4 Dealing with demands for food security, which exceed our provision.

6.5 Lack of infrastructure at rural and farm areas.