Monitoring and evaluation of the indigent exit programme in selected metropolitan municipalities in South Africa.
Ringane, Joyce Terane
Ringane, Joyce Terane
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Abstract
Eradication of extreme poverty is one of the major socio-economic challenges that is of great concern for national and international policy development today. Extreme poverty is defined as “the most severe type of poverty characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to government services" (United Nations, 2010). Governments worldwide have put so much effort in eradicating or substantially reducing poverty with the support of different business and non-profit organisations. Despite all these efforts, the levels of poverty remain unsustainable high in many parts of the world. In South Africa, poverty levels are very high with as much as 25.2 % or 15.0 million of the population living below the food poverty line (Stats SA, 2017). The government has been making efforts to eradicate extreme poverty in the country and has set a target of zero percent for people living in extreme poverty by 2030 in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations (UN). In order to achieve this goal, the government has implemented a number of various context specific programmes and strategies. Of interest in this study was the National Framework of Municipal Indigent Policies which was developed as an additional social assistance
programme to enable the poor local inhabitants to have access to basic municipal services. The local sphere of government, being the only sphere of government closest to the people responsible for provision of water and sanitation services, is therefore tasked with the responsibility of operationalising this programme in line with the Municipal Systems Act of 2000. South African municipalities are required to design and implement their own tailor-made municipal indigent programmes to enable access to basic municipal services by their residents. With sustainability of the municipal indigent programmes in mind, these municipal indigents programmes offering free basic municipal services brought a very difficult reality that indigents could not be supported for life irrespective of whether one remained indigent for life in some way or another. Municipalities are therefore tasked with the responsibility of coming up with realistic
indigent exit strategies that would enable the indigents to be capacitated and empowered so that they could be graduated from the indigent register. However,
planning realistic exit strategies for indigent households in the current socio-economic conditions in South Africa has proven to be a mammoth task (Bhorat & Cassim, 2014). The primary question that this study intended to investigate was whether the current approaches used by the municipalities to exit the indigents from the indigent register were effective in alleviating their poverty pressures. Another key objective of the study was to critique the monitoring and evaluation strategies used by the municipalities to assess the impacts of their municipal indigent exit programmes in order, and in instances where the current M&E strategies are found not to be effective to design the most appropriate and effective M&E model to implement the municipal indigent exit strategies in selected metropolitan municipalities in South Africa. In order to address these questions, a qualitative research design, using interviews and questionnaires was employed to collect primary data from the municipal officials working in the indigent departments. A combination of a purposive and convenience sampling was employed for the selection of participants and to segregate the sample for the study. Descriptive statistics, multiple regression and exploratory factor analysis
were used to analyse questionnaire results while thematic analysis was used to analyse interview findings. This study was focused on two selected metropolitan municipalities in South Africa which are located in the Gauteng Province and are the City of Johannesburg (CoJ) and City of Tshwane (CoT). The two metropolitan municipalities or metros have both developed and implemented their municipal indigent programmes and these have been active for over ten years. They also have a working framework for indigent exit strategies, however, lack appropriate and effective monitoring and evaluation (M&E) model or framework to ensure that their programmes produce the required outcomes or achieve the set goals. The results of the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) extracted four factors from the processed data which were linked to the perceptions of the staff on the current suit of indigent exit programmes employed by the two metropolitan municipalities, namely: the administration of the indigent exit strategies, the accessibility and effectiveness of the indigent exit strategies, and perceptions on the clarity of policy and legal framework. The results showed that the perceptions of the Free Basic Service (FBS) staff on the indigent exit strategies administration and the perception on the accessibility and effectiveness of the indigent exit programmes were slightly positive to positive, which could be interpreted to mean that the staff was slightly satisfied with the efforts of the municipality to manage the indigent exit programmes. The perceptions on the accessibility and effectiveness of the indigent exit programmes for the City of Tshwane staff was about two times lower than that of the City of Johannesburg. The perceptions of the FBS staff on the accessibility and effectiveness of the indigent exit strategy was positively related to all extracted factors and is
statistically significant. The perceptions on the current suit of indigent exit programmes employed by the municipalities and the clarity of policy and legal framework were found to be areas of concern, with the majority not satisfied in both municipalities. This was also corroborated by the interviews which showed that there were problems with monitoring and evolution of the programmes in both municipalities. It was also found that there were problems with the implementation framework for indigent exit strategies as no framework for impact evaluation existed. Multi-regressional analysis also showed that the clarity of the policy and the legal framework was one of the main predictors driving the sentiment of the municipal employees in their perceptions of the currently implemented indigent exit programmes, and their accessibility and effectiveness to the indigents. The study concluded that an implementation framework for the indigent exit strategies as well as a monitoring and evaluation framework for the indigent exit strategies needed to be (re-)developed to mitigate the highlighted problems. As a result, the Monitoring and Evaluation model for the implementation of the Indigent Exit Strategies for the selected metropolitan governments has been developed as a contribution of this research study to the discipline of Public Administration. The M&E model is also proposed for adoption by the selected metropolitan municipalities and could be tailor-made to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the same in all municipalities in South Africa and abroad.
Description
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Public Affairs in the Department of Public Management, Faculty of Humanities,
Tshwane University of Technology
Date
2024-08-05
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Tshwane University of Technology
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Keywords
Indigent, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Poverty, Metropolitan municipalities, South Africa