The Municipal Outreach Project is an innovative concept of the SouthAfrican Institute of Race Relations. The Institute is the leading independent research and policy organisation in South Africa. Established in 1929, the Institute has a proud record of conducting and publishing cuttingedge research and policy critiques. The Institute publishes widely on education, the economy, business, employment, crime, demographics, health, welfare, and politics. The project is also funded by the European Union and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty.

The project covers eight urban municipalities. They were chosen because, while they are all leading municipalities in terms of their contribution to their respective province’s Gross Geographic Product and are economic hubs in their provinces, they all have high levels of poverty and inequality. Service delivery protests which often occur in townships on the periphery of large urban municipalities show that the poverty challenge is not adequately addressed even by the major municipalities. The municipalities included in the project are the Nelson Mandela BayMetropolitanMunicipality (Port Elizabeth),Motheo DistrictMunicipality (Bloemfontein), City of Ekurhuleni (East Rand), City of Johannesburg, City of Tshwane (Pretoria), eThekwini MetropolitanMunicipality (Durban), Capricorn DistrictMunicipality (Polokwane), and the City of Cape Town.

In the first year of the project, the objective was to identify the key poverty challenges in these eight municipalities. This was done in two parts. First, extensive research into poverty at local government level in South Africa was collated by the Institute’s Research Department. The Institute does not measure poverty only in terms of financial poverty, but also looks at the broader manifestations of poverty which include issues such as education, employment, living conditions, and health, among others.

Second, the project team visited each of the eight municipalities to present the Institute’s research findings as well as to get feedback based on the ‘grass-roots’ experiences of councillors, officials, and development organisations working within the municipalities. Participants were divided into groups in which they discussed topics given to them by the project officer. Each group presented issues within their municipality that related to their given topic. For example, a group was given ‘Health’ as a topic and identified long queues in public hospitals as an issue. Following all the group presentations, participants were given a certain number of stickers to enable them to vote. They were asked to place their stickers on issues they felt were the most significant in their municipality.

Over the next two years of the project, these key issues will be assessed in order to identify bestpractice interventions to resolve them. The manner in which municipalities should implement these interventions will also be identified.