11 Nov 2015

The poverty eradication backlog is said to be a major setback for government’s ambition to eradicateof abject poverty by March 2017.

The Assistant Minister for Presidential Affairs and Public Administration, Mr Phillip Makgalemele, said this when addressing Tonota Sub-district Council on recently. 

He said government took a decision to halt all new applications seeking poverty eradication programmes, until all those who had been assessed to benefit as far back as 2013 were assisted.

“Recently the President issued a directive to all councils to have assisted all poverty eradication applicants who were assessed, with whatever programme they have requested before the end of November this year and it would be very exciting if procurement of goods for all beneficiaries could be done before then,” he said. 

He advised those heading the poverty eradication programmes to ensure that they always followed the programme’s five strategies of mobilisation and sensitisation, assessment, education and skills, procurements of goods for beneficiaries as well as mentoring and monitoring. 

The assistant minister further called for councillors to also play an active role in ensuring that the programme become successful.

Earlier on when giving a briefing of a consolidated report of all departments overseeing poverty eradication programmes to the assistant minister, the poverty eradication coordinator for Tonota Sub-district Council, Ms Barulaganye Mosetlha, said Tonota residents had responded positively. 

She said projects that people showed most interest on were agricultural projects, particularly animal production. 

Ms Mosetlha also decried backlog of beneficiary training as some other beneficiaries never turned up for training citing various reasons.

“We have challenges such as shortage of transport to monitor projects because without proper monitoring, many poverty eradication projects tend to fail,” she noted.

Furthermore, she said shortage of funds to complete the projects delayed water connections by Water Utilities Corporations (WUC) to beneficiaries even when connection fees had been fully paid. 

When giving statistics as at the end of October, she said the district had approved 1884 projects out of which 1029 have been funded, 118 were operational, 208 are non operational and 58 are excelling while 38 have failed. 

The sub-district had 272 partly packaged projects, 496 awaiting training and 836 awaiting packaging as at October, she said. 

She said 93 houses had been constructed for vulnerable people in various villages in the sub-district from 2011/12 to 2014/15 financial year and for the 2015/16 financial year, their sub-district had been allocated a total of 18 houses. Ends