Report on an Audit of Government's Poverty Reduction Programmes ...

3. ConclusionsIn selecting criteria for a categorization of programmes and projects, two issues were considered. In the fi rstinstance, that the categorization should lend itself to future monitoring and evaluation and in the second instance,that it should resonate with the way that decision makers see their various endeavours. Taking these twoconsiderations into account, the one approach to categorisation focuses on poverty types and the second onprogramme or project activity types. The fi rst approach defi nes programmes by the type of poverty that theyaddress (i. e. income, capability, asset, special needs and social insurance). The second approach simply defi nesprogrammes based on the existing programme interventions (i. e. social security, free basic services, subsidizedservices, housing, land reform, income generating and public works). Ideally, the poverty type and activity typecategorizations should be hybridised into one single system, as is presented in Table 1. This categorisation in Table1 should be used as the basis for scoping the series of evaluations envisaged for phase 2 of the project.An integrated database of more than 40 programmes that contains more than 29 900 projects was produced.These projects have been captured into a database developed during the study. With the incorporation of someof the largest programmes such as the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), the programme database ofthe Free State Growth and Development Strategy (FSGDS), the Poverty Management Information System of theLimpopo Growth and Development Strategy, the Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Programme (ISRDP),the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) Programme, the Settlement and Land AcquisitionGrant (SLAG) and the Comprehensive Agricultural Support Programme (CASP), a solid foundation has beendeveloped. However, many more important national and provincial programmes could have been incorporatedif the support was forthcoming from the different departments. More specifi cally, data from the Departmentof Housing’s Housing Subsidy Programme and the Department of Provincial and Local Government’s MunicipalInfrastructure Grant (MIG) was not provided. Nevertheless, it is believed that this database, for purposes ofdoing a series of evaluations of government’s efforts in addressing poverty in the second phase of the project,will suffi ce.A major challenge for this project was that no central national database of poverty reduction programmes andprojects exists. This meant that information had to be sourced from the national and provincial departmentsthemselves. Furthermore, both programmes and projects did not have sets of unique numbers to distinguishthem from one another, which means that it was diffi cult to pick up duplicate projects in the data sets and to docomparative analyses of programmes and projects from one year to another. A future requirement of any centraldatabase would be to identify both a core set of variables for which information on programmes and projectsneeds to be collected and a set of indicators for measuring the impact of programmes. Norms and standardsshould also be developed on the collection of information on programmes and projects and its storage in adatabase.x