ECIAfrica

Projects

Promoting effective policy, planning, budgeting and management within the public sector

Education and health promotion are two of the most important services a government provides its citizens. While the quality of doctors and nurses, teachers and curricula, school governance, safety, and policy are all key ingredients to a effective education and health services, the physical infrastructure, location, and condition of schools, hospitals, and clinics are an often neglected-yet critically important determinant of a country's ability to equitably care for its people.

South Africa falls short in this area of infrastructure, particularly for those people who have been historically marginalised. In some provinces, more than half of the total population's health needs are considered to be unmet based on National Department of Health service delivery standards. In the most recent School Register of Needs, 45 percent of schools nationwide lacked electricity, and 29 percent lacked potable water. While many schools have no toilet facilities at all, nearly half of the schools that do use insufficient or unsafe sanitation methods such as buckets or unimproved pit latrines. Migration to better locations causes classroom and health clinic overcrowding in some provinces, while poor infrastructure planning has resulted in building in areas where the population is declining or where there is little demand for more schools or clinics.

Accordingly, the South African government launched IDIP, managed by the National Treasury - in collaboration with the Development Bank of South Africa, National Department of Public Works, and Construction Industry Development Board—to address the problem of underspending on infrastructure and to alleviate the chronic backlog in health service, classrooms, and maintenance.

ECIAfrica and its joint venture partner the Project Shop are implementing Infrastructure Development Improvement Programmes (IDIP) over three years. In Eastern Cape, Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, and Free State, ECIAfrica provides three long-term experts-supported by shorter-term specialists in procurement, information technology, demographics analysis, and other fields as needed. Our staff advice and support the provincial Departments of Education, Health, and Public Works to build their capacity, business processes, and systems.

Specifically, under IDIP ECIAfrica is:

Establishing formalised structures to manage and monitor infrastructure delivery;
Establishing an integrated provincial infrastructure planning function for education and health infrastructure;
Instituting adequate monitoring and control processes and systems;
Promoting a cooperative change culture within the relevant provincial government departments to support education and health infrastructure delivery; and
Improving departmental capacity for effective delivery of infrastructure.

South Africa

June 2006 - October 2009

Client:

National Treasury

Contact:

Sipho Dayel

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