The South African Institute of Race Relations has embarked on and funded a project also funded by the European Union and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty. The overall objective of the project is to strengthen the institutional and participatory development capacity of local government to combat growing poverty in South Africa’s major municipal districts. It aims to equip the estimated 1 800 local government elected councillors and officials to better understand and implement poverty alleviation interventions available to them.

The project is designed to assist in achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving global poverty by 2014. This initiative seeks to achieve this by improving the capacity of domestic elected representatives and government officials at local government level in South Africa.

It is expected that the elected councillors and government officials accurately identify the poverty challenges confronting their communities and are made aware of and encouraged to implement the best practice interventions to address these poverty challenges. The estimated 16 Million residents of the eight targeted municipalities will be the final beneficiaries of these interventions.

Two major publications will be distributed to the councillors and officials during the course of this project. The “Fast Facts for Municipalities” is a monthly publication with summary statistics and articles. The “South Africa Survey” is an annual publication that contains more extensive detail on various topics about South Africa. Both publications cover statistics and other information based on topics such as demographics, the economy, business and employment, education, health and welfare, living conditions and communications, crime and security, as well as politics and governance.

These publications will be a vehicle to distribute municipal data and research findings to the target groups. They will also make the councillors and officials aware of the broader socio-economic trends in South Africa. This will assist them to better understand how their challenges are often a function of more general trends. This will also aid them in adopting intervention strategies that account for such broader trends. They will also be better equipped to compare development trends in their municipal authorities with those of other authorities, provinces and national government.