From Africa Renewal, Vol.20 #3 (October 2006), page 6 By Gumisai Mutume In many countries, immediate, short-term solutions are needed to quickly ease the burden of unemployment. Public works programmes are a popular option. South Africa, which commits more than $800 mn to public works, has one of the best programmes on the continent, reports the ILO. In terms of technical design standards and the quality of completed physical infrastructure, the country’s public works programme “was regarded as surpassing anything that the ILO members of an evaluation team had encountered in more than 30 developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific,” notes the ILO.
The Community Based Public Works Programme, designed to provide rapid and visible relief to the poor, helped create 130,000 jobs between 1998 and 2004. In the latter year, the government launched the Enhanced Public Works Programme, with a goal of creating a million jobs over five years. The programme employs unskilled and semi-skilled people to build schools, hospitals and roads, giving them short-term incomes and, hopefully, long-term skills.
“Public works are popular with politicians as they offer the opportunity for a government to claim to be ‘creating jobs’ in a far more direct and observable way than through the opaque medium of long-term processes which deliver genuine economic growth and employment,” comments South African economist Anna McCord.
But in a context of chronic poverty, which is neither cyclical nor temporary, public works programmes will not have a significant or sustained impact, she adds. This is because the jobs offered are short-term — lasting only about 4 months — and the wages are low. Even if South Africa’s programme were to create the envisaged 200,000 jobs annually, that would benefit only a small fraction of the country’s poor and unemployed. Out of a population of 45 million, 24 million live below the poverty line.
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