In the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, even though 87% of households have access to electricity, 27% use paraffin or coal for heating, 22% use paraffin or candles for lighting, and 22% use paraffin for cooking. One of the reasons for this is the cost of electricity. The proportion of households without any earned income in the metro is 174 689 out of 776 470 households, or 23%. Even though most of these households have access to electricity, poor households tend not to use it.

In South Africa, the type of energy used by rural and peri-urban areas depends on the season and availability. For instance, a lot of coal is burned in townships in the Highveld during winter for space heating, whilst more paraffin and gas are used during summer.

A similar trend is seen in all other municipalities, some to a greater extent than others, where poorer households use alternative sources of energy which are cheap and easily obtained.

While there have been strides made in the provision of electricity, the challenge is to involve the poor in using it. The sustainable improvement of living conditions for poor people will require breaking their dependency on the state. That will in turn require a growing economy that creates employment opportunities. That will in turn require a school and education system capable of delivering a highly skilled graduate to the labour market. In South Africa today those two conditions do not exist. Challenging poverty and inequality levels will therefore require more than providing services but ensuring that the beneficiaries of those services are not so poor that they cannot use them.

The municipal outreach project aims to provide extensive research, such as that used in the above analysis, to municipalities covered by the Municipal Outreach Project. This will be done by means of publications, the project website, and workshops. A monthly publication called Fast Facts for Local Government (F3LG) is sent to local councillors, officials, and development organisations in the eight municipalities covered by the project. A weekly newsletter is posted on the project website on Fridays, and e-mailed to project beneficiaries. The annual South Africa Survey, published by the Institute, will be posted to municipalities and extracts posted on the project website.

Workshops will take place during the course of the project in each of the eight municipalities. The first will be the Major Urban Poverty Challenges Identification (MUPCI) workshops which will take place during 2009, and will be designed for elected councillors and officials to identify what they see as the major poverty challenges facing their constituents. The Urban Poverty Intervention (UPI) workshops will take place during 2010, and will explore policy interventions appropriate to the challenges identified in the MUPCI workshops. The Anti Poverty Intervention Implementation Proposals (APIIP) workshops will take place during 2011, and will formally propose the policy interventions identified in the first two years.

 

Municipal councillors and officials, as well as development organisations working within these municipalities, are encouraged to participate in this pioneering initiative to combat poverty in South Africa's major urban districts.

-Nthamaga Kgafela