17 Sep 2015

The Assistant Minister for Presidential Affairs and Public Administration Mr Dikgang Makgalemele has urged the Jwaneng leadership to devise a specific strategy for poverty eradication, job creation as well as local economic development.

He called on the council’s leaders to conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis on their town which he said will inform their strategy on how to deal with the issues. Mr Makgalemele was speaking during an administrative and political leadership consultative meeting that he addressed in Jwaneng recently. 

He noted that such a strategy would go a long way in addressing specific challenges that Jwaneng based projects were facing.

He said the government was committed to have eradicated abject poverty by March 2017, and this could be possible if implementers of the poverty eradication program were also innovative. 

He said though the main focus was eradicating abject poverty, the government could also not disregard unemployment as it contributed to poverty. Even though the government had come up with 45 business projects to address poverty, Mr Makgalemele said the leadership was at liberty to come up with additional projects that could best suit the districts. 

He said these additional programmes would be considered to be incorporated into their package as a district.

“You are free to think outside the box about additional opportunities that are outside the 45 business projects that are available,” he explained.

He acknowledged the challenges that resulted in delayed implementation of the poverty eradication programmes, but advised that backlog should be eliminated by end of this month.

He said officers should speed up the training of beneficiaries and purchasing of material so that projects should start operating. Furthermore, the assistant minister said where there were challenges identified such as lack of market and shortage of water, applicants who had been trained for certain projects should be asked to change and enroll for those suitable for them.

He further said beneficiaries should be advised to group themselves together and form cooperatives for easy training on specific areas needed by businesses. 

He said this was due to the fact that a business needed specialised units such as business management and marketing, and training could be easily provided if they operate as a cooperative.

He urged the Jwaneng leadership to identify businesses that could employ people in the township. He said if supported fully, such businesses would eventually employ even those people from outside Jwaneng.

Mr Makgalemele said generally the uptake of government programmes were unsatisfactory across the country, something he said prompted his ministry to come up with a monitoring tool to assess the utilisation and implementation of such programmes.

On people living with disabilities, Mr Makgalemele said the government was committed to ensuring that such people had equal access to different programmes available in various sectors including education, health as well as poverty eradication. He said the government took a deliberate decision to give them a monthly P300 allowance to cushion them against financial hardships.

The Jwaneng town clerk-Technical Services Mr Masiela Mandoze said the main challenge facing government programmes in Jwaneng was lack of operational space. 

He however noted that the council had managed to lease operational space to seven beneficiaries and encouraged others to keep operating from where they are based, despite the challenges.

Furthermore, he said the council recently went on a benchmarking mission from the Moshupa sub district and was considering adopting their purchasing process to speed up implementation of the programme.

“The plan is to adopt the grant system of purchasing in which clients are given cheques, cash and go for purchasing on the same day with the escort of officers. This proved to be a very reliable and time saving method which we plan to adopt,” he said. Ends