Newsletter 85- Creating opportunities for poverty alleviation, Part 2 – 20 August 2010
Last week’s newsletter gave a review of some of the best practices in the areas of education and basic services that were identified during the Anti-Poverty Interventions and Implementation workshops. This week’s newsletter will review best practices that were proposed in the areas of health and households with no income.
From July 2010, the Municipal Outreach Project team has undertaken Anti-Poverty Interventions and Implementation (APII) workshops with three of the eight municipalities covered by the project. Participants are councillors, officials, and representatives of development organisations in the respective municipalities. Participants have to develop creative, new, innovative, and ‘out of the box’ best- practice interventions to overcome respective poverty challenges. Below are some of the best-practice interventions developed by the participants in the areas of health and households with no income.
Health
In the three workshops held to date, the main concern raised was that a large number of health care facilities are often overcrowded and experience a dire lack of medication. In the City of Johannesburg and the City of Ekurhuleni (East Rand), participants proposed that there should be clinics that operate 24 hours a day as a best practice for combating overcrowding.
In order to ensure that there are enough medical supplies, Johannesburg’s participants proposed that details medical supplies should be kept on a database and recorded electronically as they are given out or used. The database should be connected to the database of the supplier, who can then keep track of how the clinic’s supplies decrease instead of waiting until the clinic has run out.
The participants from the Motheo District Municipality (Bloemfontein) proposed the establishment of a clinic committee as a best practice. They said the committee can play a role in keeping clinic staff in check. It can also be the voice of the community and it can communicate their needs and grievances in a more organised manner.
Households with no income
Ekurhuleni’s participants proposed a ‘one company, one job’ initiative as a best practice for job creation. The municipality can partner up with 4 500 companies around the municipality and motivate each company to employ one extra person. Succesfully implemented, this initiative can lead to the employment of 4 500 people. Further, the municipality can provide incentives for companies to employ as many people as possible. They can, for example, contribute a certain percentage towards the salaries of the people the companies will be employing.
Johannesburg’s workshop participants identified a best practice for helping households with no income as the strengthening of existing food gardens. They said these food gardens must not only provide food security but also create sustainability, independence, and entrepreneurship. They proposed that the municipality can have partnerships with fresh produce shops that can buy the produce from the community. The returns from the sales can then be invested into starting small businesses for the people involved, in turn creating sustainable livelihoods.
Motheo’s participants said a best practice for households with no income would be for people to register with the municipality as job seekers, in particular manual labourers. These people can then be employed by the municipality on a rotation basis. People such as trash collectors and street sweepers can be employed on a three-month basis and then give another group of people a chance to be employed for three months, and so the groups can rotate every three months.
The results of best-practice proposals from these workshops will be published later in the year and all the project beneficiaries will receive the publication. Municipalities can use this publication as a learning tool or reference book. They can use it to learn from the successful experiences of other municipalities that developed opportunities to combat poverty in their municipality.
- Nachi Majoe
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nmajoe
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last modified
2010-08-20 11:26
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