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

of different departments and programmes (e.g. the Free State and Mpumalanga).Although certain programmes, such as the EPWP of the national Department of Public Works and the IntegratedSustainable Rural Development (ISRD), Urban Renewal Programme (URP), Local Economic Development,Consolidated Municipal Infrastructure Programme (CMIP) and Municipal Infrastructure Grant (MIG) of theDepartment of Provincial and Local Government (DPLG) contain the majority of the poverty reduction projectsbeing implemented for national and provincial departments, some national and provincial departments areimplementing smaller programmes on their own, such as the Department of Social Development’s Food andEmergency Relief Programme and the HIV and AIDS Programme. Furthermore, provinces are implementingpoverty relief projects using their own funds that are not registered in the databases of the larger programmesand, therefore, the necessity for the Premiers’ Offi ces to collate information on their poverty relief programmesat a provincial level.A complexity of these project databases is that they may be incorporated into both national and provincialdatabases resulting in records possibly being duplicated. Without a unique programme or project identifi cationcode, the ability to identify these duplicate records is limited and can only be done through a comparison ofproject names, which is extremely diffi cult to do and very time consuming. There would clearly be a need fordepartments to fi nd ways on sharing information on their individual databases to avoid such duplication.What became apparent is that there is little or no standards for information provided on poverty reductionprogrammes and their projects. This confi rms the necessity for a system to report on a standardized set ofpoverty relief programme indicators.Clearly, this points to the need for departments to adopt better approaches (e.g. norms and standards andindicators), as suggested by National Treasury. There is also the need for a system that will allow the informationfrom national and provincial departments to be easily accessed for monitoring and evaluation purposes.Twenty-nine thousand, nine hundred and sixty-six (29 966) projects are presented in the integrated database. Infuture, consideration should be given to how information on poverty relief programmes become “offi cial” statisticsthat can be incorporated into the National Statistical System (NSS) and contain the necessary endorsement fromdepartments that the data provided is accurate and complete.Statistics South Africa as custodian of the National Statistics System could provide advice on indicators to usein the reporting on poverty reduction programmes. The Presidency could play a facilitation role to get thenecessary systems in place that would allow the data on poverty reduction programmes and projects to berecorded into a central database as is suggested in the PoA. At this stage it is recommended that the Presidencybe the custodian of the central database.Having such a system and comprehensive central database will allow departments to get access to the informationthey require to inform their planning systems and to undertake evaluations of government programmes.4.2.2 Capturing of programme and project data received into the databaseThroughout the project, programme managers were requested to provide the data in a digital format. Digitalformats ranged from documents supplied in Microsoft Word format and as Microsoft Excel workbooks witheither one or multiple sheets. They were also requested to provide specifi c data that could be used to populatethe database.Many of the programmes provided a list of poverty relief projects in hardcopy format. Documents that appearedon websites were usually in a PDF format and these were printed and treated as hard copies, since extractingtext from PDF documents was regarded as too time-consuming. Project team members were responsible for30