The North West Department of Public Works and Roads, says it hopes to address most of the challenges faced by the Expand Public Works Programme (EPWP) beneficiaries after they complete their three-year programme.
This was revealed on Friday by the MEC Gaoage Molapisi, during the EPWP Summit in Klerksdorp who said the challenge remains in adhering to the programme agreement.
“This makes me wonder if we are truly committed to honouring our commitment and it reflects the lack of participation by various sectors in pushing the implementation of this initiative,” he said.
The government implemented EPWP as a flagship programme aimed to address unemployment and poverty alleviation. It was also meant to provide the unemployed people an opportunity to work, gain skills as well as bolster investor confidence in the labour market.
Molapisi urged government officials attending the summit to revisit the initiative and investigate why there was a lack of engagement by some sectors in advancing this programme to its goal.
He said government officials must not just focus on the large number of people who participate in the programme, but also on whether they are appropriately skilled.
“Numbers will not have a meaning if we just consume or up the numbers but at the end of the day, we do not know where we are taking these people. There is no exit strategy. They are not skilled, it becomes meaningless and that is why many of them would refuse to exit the programme.
“We want to ensure that we have people who are skilled and remove the narrative that these are people who are just lying under the trees doing nothing because people do not see value in the EPWP programme but there is great value in terms of what this programme can bring,” he said.
The Department’s National Deputy Director General Carmen-Joy Abrahams said: “One thing that we must also recognise is that the EPWP participants that we are targeting do not have work experience and the value add is the work experience.
“According to statistics South Africa, when a person is from an EPWP project the person is four times better placed to get employment versus somebody that has never worked on the EPWP programme”.
Under the programme, small contractors will be mentored so that they can compete effectively for tenders for municipal and provincial government labour-intensive projects. The summit comes a few months before the start of phase 5 of the programme.
