30 Nov 2014

Minister for Presidential Affairs and Public
 Administration, Mr Eric Molale, has implored planners to fast track the
 poverty eradication programme.

Closing the 
poverty eradication workshop for planners in Palapye on November 27, Mr Molale said
 the country was left with three years to eradicate poverty as such planners should ensure that beneficiaries did not take a longer time to receive 
poverty eradication packages.

He said it
 was worrisome that beneficiaries got trained and took a longer time to receive
 packages, adding “if they wait for a package for a long time, it is no longer
 poverty eradication.”

He said for
 poverty eradication to be a success, planners should improve on the 
turn-around time for a beneficiary to receive a package and create an enabling 
environment for citizens to access programmes.

He said
 planners had ample resources at their disposal including the human
 resource citing intern graduates and NGOs, which they could use to reach out to
the poor.

Furthermore,
 he said planners should work together to move the household poverty 
incidence from 10.8 per cent to at least four per cent, adding that there were parts of the country that were highly affected by poverty citing Nkgwaketse,
Central, Kweneng, Kgalagadi and Ngamiland.

Mr Molale 
also called for mindset change towards poverty eradication so that planners could 
have an understanding of what poverty eradication was and avoid contradicting 
one another during implementation.

The minister
 said the village leadership; village extension teams and village development 
committees should be involved and regularly interact with one another to help 
their respective communities.

On the other 
hand he said district extension committees should be hands on in this programme 
as such planners should ensure that they kept score cards for the village s
under their jurisdiction in order to have information on programmes in those villages 
and their success rate.

Poverty
 eradication, he said, was a people centred approach development programme, which 
was aimed at improving the lives of communities as such it was the first stage in
changing people’s lives for the better.

The second
 stage, he said, was local economic development to make linkages of how various
 activities and programmes combine to make a local economy thrive, adding that
 within this approach poverty eradication became a reality.

For his part, 
the poverty eradication coordinator, Dr John Mothibi raised concern over 
management of data across the districts. He said districts needed a cadre of
 people dealing with specifically data management, which will help inform the 
relevant people who the poor were and who were stepping out of poverty.



He also urgedplanners to know their targets and take people out of
poverty holistically. He said the
 chronically poor were hiding somewhere and would not come to government offices
 to ask for help therefore it is the responsibility of planners to identify such
 people and help them. ENDS