UN steps in to nudge country towards MDGs

Bottlenecks in service delivery are hampering South Africa's efforts to meet its Millennium Development Goals of eradicating poverty and halving unemployment by 2015, said the UN Development Programme (UNDP), which has drawn up a four-year plan to help the country.

"Poor service delivery is a major constraint preventing South Africa from achieving sustainable growth," said Philip Browne, a UNDP programme advisor.

The International Monetary Fund projects a required annual growth of at least seven percent to meet the UN MDGs, but according to the Bureau for Economic Research at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa is likely to record growth of 4.5 percent in 2006/07, slightly down from the 4.9 percent of 2005.

Mozambique and Angola are the only two Southern African economies to have achieved the seven percent target.

The 'UN Development Assistance Framework to South Africa 2007-2010' aims to guide the government and provide interventions where needed to help the country meet its targets.

"Our efforts are mostly concentrated around capacity development," said Browne. In a country disfigured by its apartheid legacy of poverty and inequality, newer problems like brain drain, HIV/AIDS and a general lack of skills have also affected the delivery of basic services like water, electricity, medical care, education, sanitation and housing.

An estimated 34 percent of South Africa's 47.4 million people live on less than US$2 a day and 5.2 million people are HIV positive.

Almost half of South Africa lives in rural areas but has access to only 12 percent of the country's doctors and 19 percent of its nurses; in poorer provinces like Limpopo there is only one doctor for every 7,000 people, said Fazila Farouk, editor of the information portal of the Southern African Non-Governmental Organisation Network (SANGONeT), citing statistics compiled by the AIDS activist NGO, Treatment Action Campaign.

The UN has already stepped in to resolve the crisis in Limpopo with the help of 16 international volunteer doctors, who work on renewable one-year contracts and are paid a monthly living allowance covering food and rent, funded jointly by the South African government and the UNDP.

Lack of capacity has also prevented local governments from adhering to service delivery targets, said Glenn Hollands of Afesis-Corplan, a development NGO based in the Eastern Cape, one of the poorest provinces in South Africa.

He pointed out that municipalities in the province had failed to keep up with delivery targets to replace the bucket system of sewage collection every year for the past six years.

According to Buyelwa Sonjica, Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry, 16 million South Africans were without access to hygienic sanitation facilities. However, the South African Institute of Race Relations, a local think-tank, noted in its latest survey that the number of people using the bucket system or who were without toilets had declined from 13 percent of the population in 2002 to 11 percent in 2004.

Two weeks ago, under the UN's volunteer programme, engineers were deployed to Eastern Cape to help two municipalities eradicate the bucket system and assist with other infrastructural problems.

Under the famework, the UNDP is considering other initiatives to help the country, such as the Southern African Capacity Initiative (SACI), launched in 2004 to deal with the loss of administrative skills in the region caused HIV/AIDS and the brain drain.

Besides using voluneteers, SACI promotes best business practices used in the private sector to help identify bottlenecks in service delivery, and designs interventions to produce better time management and eliminate duplication.

The government has spent almost US$4 billion on providing housing to the poor since 1994, but has been unable to keep up with the growing number of people caught in the poverty trap; it now has a backlog of 2.4 million houses.

"The government also lays claim to delivering two million houses since 1994, however, housing NGOs argue that they have delivered nothing more than ghettos ... [and] that nine million poor South Africans are in the housing queue," said Farouk.

While the government's MDG review notes a "significant success" in the rate of primary school enrolments - 95 percent of 7 to 13 year olds attend school - education analysts contend that 70 percent of learners are functionally illiterate and innumerate.

"More alarming, in light of the unemployment crisis, is the fact that over 30 percent of adult South Africans are functionally illiterate", she said.

Recognising the need, the government has launched the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition, with set targets in various sectors, for example, increasing the number of engineers by 2,400 a year and the number of skilled artisans by 50,000 over the next four to five years.

jk/he