Following the 2003 Growth and Development Summit, which was held to endorse special measures to support cooperatives as part of strategies for job creation in the South African economy, government agreed on the massification of Phase 1 of the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), which included a five-year target of one-million work opportunities, EPWP operations chief director Kelebogile Sethibelo said at a green jobs event in Midrand, Gauteng, last month.

She added that Phase 1 achieved its one- million work opportunities target one year ahead of schedule, but that unemployment remained high, worsening from 2008 with onset of the global economic crisis.

Encouraged by the success of the massification of Phase 2, which had a target of one-million work opportunities in four years and was launched in 2009, and responding to the local job-loss crisis linked to the global economic crisis – an ambitious target of 4.5-million work opportunities was set.

“There have also been new developments in Phase 2, including the introduction of the non-State sector, comprising the Community Work Programme and the Non-Profit Organi- sation Programme, as well as the National, Provincial and Municipal EPWP Incentive,” Sethibelo said.

She noted that government’s New Growth Path policy clearly deviated from its first and second economy paradigm.

Sethibelo added that, with chronic unemployment in many developed economies, the scale and innovative achievements of South Africa’s project execution plans (PEPs) have attracted international interest.

“However, these achievements have not sufficiently been communicated in the country,” she said.

She commented that South Africa’s PEPs cut across several sectors, had a rural and urban focus and were championed through different line departments, provinces and municipalities.

Sethibelo also stated that labour-intensive methods had been mainstreamed into government infrastructure, contracting the work of PEPs, rather than having PEPs operate in separate silos.

“South Africa has been a global pioneer in applying PEPs according to scale to environmental services, including the Working for Water (WfW) and Working on Fire (WoF) programmes,” she said.

She pointed out that the WfW Programme saved as much as R400-billion to date and cleared more than two-million hectares of alien invasive plants, while the WoF Programme has saved the forestry industry R3.7-billion– on a budget of R123-million.

She stated that South Africa was still the only country in the world with a range of PEPs in the social sector – including adult education, early childhood care, school-feeding schemes, school safety and homework supervision programmes, and home-based care programmes.

“Through the EPWP, we are working with Non-State Sector programmes, which are inclusive of nongovernmental faith-based and community-based organisations – an important counterweight to the dangers of excessive bureaucratisation of PEPs,” Sethibelo said.