Social policy in South Africa – 1996

Estudo técnico realizado a pedido da Unicef, na África do Sul, sobre as formas renovadas de gestão de políticas sociais que a descentralização e sistemas participativos permitem. Publicado em português pela revista Cultura Vozes, julho-agosto 1997, com o título Política Social Urbana na África do Sul – Fax (011) 258.7070. (L. Dowbor)

Decentralized Urban Social Policy in South Africa

“If you are cold and want an extra blanket, you might petition the minister of justice, but you will get no response. If you go to the commissioner of prisons, he will say, “Sorry, it is against regulations.” The head of prison will say, “If I give you an extra blanket, I must give one to everyone.” But if you approach the warder in your corridor, and you are on good terms with him, he will simply go to the stockroom and fetch a blanket” Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 497

“By mobilising the resources of urban communities, government and the private sector we can make our cities centres of opportunity for all South Africans, and competitive within the world economy. The success of this will depend on the initiative taken by urban residents to build their local authorities and promote local economic development.” Nelson Mandela, The Urban Development Strategy White Paper

1 – Old and new challenges

South Africa faces a legacy of impressive disparities. While it displays a reasonably comfortable per capita of 2.700 dollars, and proudly shows its rich cities and modern infrastructures, 30 thousand children die every year from problems that are cheap and easy to be solved, 12 million inhabitants out of an estimated 41 million do not have access to adequate potable water, 21 million lack basic sanitation facilities, 30 to 40 percent of the active population are unemployed.

Apartheid has been overthrown, a democratic government has been elected, the country is opening itself to the world. But for the administration, the problems have grown more urgent, and it now faces more than the already tragic legacy of apartheid.

Opening to the world means that the cocoon of protected market with low salaries is now exposed, and the economy is faced with a whole set of measures that will tend to further depress modern sector employment. Thus the repayment of the social debt must be made parallel to a major effort of restructuring and modernizing the economy.

As other countries have found, economic modernization is not possible, at the present stage of technological development, without social development and an educated workforce, and corporations will now feel the full economic weight of decades of insufficient social investment.

Opening the internal and external borders has led to a massive acceleration of rural exodus, and vast demographic displacements which demand a new generation of investments on infrastructure and social services. Informal settlements spring up almost overnight, absorbing the limited financial and even more limited public management capacities.

Simultaneously, the political pressure for service delivery has been strongly increasing, since the vast majority of the population consider that the time has come for them to have what they were deprived of, and if possible at the same level of those that deprived them. While poverty and deprivation have been comfortably isolated in townships, disparities presently mingle throughout the urban space and create new pressures for change.

To face the legacy and the new challenges the new regime inherited a fragmented state, with little management sense in a modern view, with sometimes dozens of overlapping structures; a mosaic of district and administrative divisions that are different for justice, education, health and other areas that should be able to work in a coordinated way at the level of impact; and a general lack of minimally logical demographic space distribution, with absurd settlements distant from jobs or infrastructure, generating high costs of transportation and lack of synergies between social, economic and cultural space. This urban structure has correctly been diagnosed as having become financially unsustainable for the apartheid regime. But it continues to be structurally unsustainable now.

2- A new political strategy

Thus the government has to simultaneously promote transformation of society and transformation of its own instruments of government, under heavy pressure from the global economy for cost-effectiveness, and from the social backlog within the country demanding jobs, salaries, infrastructure and social services.

The first strategic decision of the new government is that such challenges are to be met by all the key roleplayers in the country, and not by the government alone. Considering the challenges to be met, there is clearly no other path. While this has been a common piece of rethoric in many places,in South Africa it gave place to practical instruments of participatory government.

Thus the creation of the National Economic Development and Labour Council, NEDLAC, a negotiating and agreement making body consisting of government and the other social partners, allows for the main national issues to be negotiated with all stakeholders. The ideas of national unity, of partnership, of a clear understanding of the different interests became a philosophy of governance. Issues such as unemployment, savings and investment relationship, access to basic services and infrastructure, low productivity, income and other key problems can thus be effectively negotiated with a long range time-horizon, and with stakeholders understanding that improved social and economic productivity improves the situation of everyone. In a time of easy government-bashing, South Africa is building government capacity not by expanding its bureaucracy but by improving its leverage power on society as a whole.

A second major decision concerns the privatisation issue. The clear option for partnership-based governance enables the government to build a new vision of the respective roles of the state, the private sector and communities: “Although the Government of National Unity expects to gain valuable insights from studying and observing the successes and limitations of comparative models of administration reform, caution and critical analysis will be exercised in considering the applicability and possible incorporation of such models into the change process in South Africa. This will certainly be the case with the move towards cost reduction and the privatisation and contracting-out of state services. The Government is well-aware that in some countries this has had adverse effects, in terms of declining service standards, worsening conditions of employment for staff, rising unemployment and the increasing marginalisation of disadvantaged groups, women and chilren in particular. The move towards a leaner and more cost-effective public service in South Africa will therefore be based not on privatisation but on the creation of effective partnerships between government, labour, business and civil society, and the building of high levels of community involvement in the local delivery of services.”

A third key element of the strategy is to rely on decentralized and participatory management, envolving local administrations and community ownership of development initiatives. Thus the outdated and inefficient models of social services delivery, centralized and based on charity for the poor, are to be substituted by empowerment and by local organization. Social services do not work efficiently if people do not feel responsible for them, and responsability involves citizenship and full local decision capacity.

3 – The integrated local development approach The traditional philosophy of service delivery must be revised. As what is at stake in not some complementary support for the poor, but the delivery of basic infrastructure and social services to more than 25 million deprived people, the very cost of the process shows that mere extension of services is not the solution. The extension of health services, for example, with its present concentration on curative and hospital medicine, would probably absorb the whole social budget. And expecting the poor communities to financially sustain such services is simply not realistic.

The social area relies not on economies of scale, but on synergy and very adequate tailoring of the initiatives according to local situations. No one knows better what street gets muddy when it rains than the community that uses it. Centralized decision making can be adequate for the construction and management of a big hospital, but not for the thousands of small scale actions that will generate preventive health measures. And social services are not exactly “delivered” to a community: they must be built into the local culture and daily life, through breast feeding, adequate use of water resources, family support of school related activities and so forth, demanding a permanent management structure to make the services sustainable.

For the rich, social services can ultimately be considered as commercial utilities, which they will buy as they need them. But for the rapid promotion of poor communities, the school must also be used as a means to ensure the children have at least a good meal, the good will of women’s organizations must be used to promote hygiene and other issues, the participation of the community is necessary to ensure garbage disposal and a safer environment and so forth. It is impossible to expect that sectoral actions decided in different ministries will magically become coordinated at the local level, if the recepients do not get organized for this coordination. Integration is necessary, and it is feasible only at the level of impact of the different social services.

The alternative of more extended central services with heavier government planning systems to ensure overall coherence, and longer fingers with new tiers of government to ensure outreach is not only politically undesirable, but simply less efficient both from quality and cost perspectives.

Evidently, it is not only a question of passing more public resources to the local level. Society must be allowed to administer itself more flexibly, in accordance with the characteristics of each municipality. The new style requires simpler and more direct mechanisms of participation by key players at local level – business, unions, community organizations, traditional leadership, scientific and information institutions and others. It also requires new, more rapid mechanisms for communication with the population, because a society has to be well informed to be able to participate. It requires flexibilization of financial mechanisms, with fewer rules and auditors and more direct control by committees and councils of the communities involved. It requires that local government’s field of interest be broadened beyond urban cosmetics and some social issues, to become a catalyst of economic and social forces in the area. Finally, it requires the formation of horizontal networks of coordination and cooperation between municipalities, both at the general level and around sectoral programmes.

4 – Institution building time-horizon and social urgencies

These views are clearly exposed in the different white papers and other government policy papers and studies, and correspond to the modern trends of public administration. They are also essential for Unicef’s contribuiton to the country programmes, since they outline an adequate institutional environment for social programmes to be productive.

Nevertheless, they are central government strategies. Between the political decision at the level of central government and the effective creation of capacity at the local level, there is a time lag that anyone involved in institution building and transformation of public services knows to be very long.

The local councils have just been elected. The “who does what at what level” discussion between central, provincial and local government is still under way. Traditional administrators at the local level are frequently unwilling to help with the effort of community participatory development. Training a new generation of personnel takes time, and their acquiring experience and competence will take even more time.

Thus there is very high competence at the administrative core of government, and an exceptional capacity to draw up and to negotiate adequate strategies. But the foundations of the administrative pyramid, including provincial but especially local governments, will take a long time to have their capacity increased.

A key policy gap is thus the time lag between the definition of policies and the capacity to create the institutional environment for their implementation at the local level. The Masakhane Campaign, aimed at normalising governance and accelerating municipal service provision, shows that creating local and sustainable capacity requires a wider set of measures.

5 – Service delivery in the transition period

The transition period, which the Government sees as ending in 1999, when the new elections are due, is thus a crucial period. Services will have to be delivered on a new scale and at a pace that cannot wait for the long institution building period.

While it is basically correct that the deprived communities should not expect government to solve their problems for them, it is also true they must be given support to take the necessary initiatives. Thus direct support to community organization has become essential.

What is suggested in this paper is that direct support to communities, aiming at the stimulation of their own initiatives to solve their basic problems, should rely on fast-track flexible administrative schemes that would gradually be incorporated into the formal administrative system as the local governments develop sufficient management capacity.

• Communications
  The capacity to organize the communities has suffered from the fact that important social organizers from the resistance movement now face central government responsibilities. On the other hand, the impatience of the deprived populations tends to grow as the hopes that were raised with the democratization process fail to bring the expected results.Social services delivery and sustained community organization rely heavily on political temperature, on the general feeling of confidence or abandonment that pervades a community, on the feeling that things are happening, or what the White Papers calls “vibration”. The existence of a vibrant community is a precious capital. When people want to make things happen, they have an impressive capacity. This capital does not resist to years of frustration awaiting for the initiatives to reach them, nor can enthusiasm be expected to rise when the message received from government is not support but the necessity to pay.

  On the other hand, decades of organized resistance to apartheid show that people can be patient and active if they are well informed, if they understand what is going on, if the path the government suggests they take is understandable and viable.

  Thus communications become of paramount importance in this period of transition, in this period of scarce capacity to reach the communities through permanent structures and weak organized community information flows.

  The TV audience in the country was estimated at 12 million in 1994, and 82% of homes had a radio. Community radio has been spreading quickly. While newspapers are dominated by the Argus Group, the state has at its disposal a very modern infrastructure of radio and TV communication that does not demand heavy investments. But it demands to be intelligently used to bring to the population the basic information and support it needs to stimulate commmunity initiative.

  Systematic information on the water situation in the country, on the management systems that are being created, on how different communities are solving different problems, showing “best practices” of local level initiatives, in the line of the excellent Unicef PPO chapter on communications, can help bridge the administrative gap that is inevitable in this transition period.

   

• Money
  Although the tradition of complaining over money shortage is well rooted, the key problem concerning funding and financement is actually organization. The Streetwise NGO gets a streetchild partially schooled, fed and organized on 12 rands a day. A lack of this preventive action results in repressive costs that will immediately jump to three digits per day, not to speak of the social costs. Large scale housing schemes, based on centralized decisions and big contractors, lead to houses that cost twice as much as mutual help schemes, or to the so called “Flushing Meadows” where the community is expected to be agreably organized around latrines. No technical rationale can work if you do not take into consideration what the people want. And it may be difficult for an architect to understand the pleasure it is for a family to build its own house.Communities need support, rather than initiatives that tend to substitute their participation. A Latin-american mayor who became famous for his success in local initiatives, when asked about his planning techniques, simply pointed to his ear: he listened.

  Funding schemes are well represented by the image of a bird in your hand: if you hold it too tight, it will not breathe; if you hold too loose, it will go. If the squeeze on money is too strong, there will be no community initiatives. If the money is too easy, there will be corruption and loss of efficiency. The worst is when the money is budgeted, and bureaucratic schemes make acess so difficult that people get demoralized. It is then perfectly possible, and indeed quite frequent, to have the expenditure without the results.

  For the transition period, what is necessery is an ad hoc flexible system of grass-root initiative funding, seed money and the like, to make sure that when a group, a community or a municipality muster enthusiasm to take a socially useful initiative, it will have rapid access to the necessary funds.

  Throughout the world small scale credit to communities schemes have shown to be exceptionally productive, and the poor to be much more serious payers. Untangling the juridical nightmare to ensure communities can have juridical personnality and clear “rules of the game” for funding and financing local initiative might be essential.

  Again, when the municipalities will have trained administrators and management experience these flows will naturally occur at local level, without the necessity of transition structures. But for the transition period, other measures are necessary.

   

• Training
  A great amount of training is being done to help communities take off. This is an essential activity. It is important to remind that although if figures in all Unicef programmes, it seldom is the core.A multitude of initiatives in different parts of the world show that training brings good results. On the other hand, the productivity of training could be much higher. Whenever possible, training should be done in the interested community, and following a curriculum negociated with the community. They will learn best what they want to learn.

  An initiative in Costa Rica was to organize extensive meetings with poor communities to discuss with them what they would consider most useful knowledge. The demands can be grouped under three chapters: “community organization”, with such subjects as basic legal knowledge of their rights, forms of community organization, communication, the workings of public administration so they can find their way around and so forth; a second group of training curricula demanded by the communities can be grouped under the “infrastructure techniques” chapter, envolving street improvement, house building, water black waters sterilization, sanitary garbage disposal and so forth; finally, a third group of demands concerned small scale production for the unemployed, such as baking of bread, sewing and the like. All taken together, the curriculum structure organized by the communities was far more logical than the formal curricula normally organized by outside specialists. In a way, training has to be considered as a common good, which the client is to be able to chose.

  A more sophisticated scheme is the “capacitation” experience in South African community housing initiatives. If an external contractor builds a house, the result is a house. If the house is understood as part of a process of a community, the results will be that several people learned to build houses, that local jobs have been created, eventually a small enterprise has sprung up to build more houses, the community got organized to get a job done and thus can continue to do other jobs. In this line of thought, training enters into a community building process, and this is clearly better than getting people in a classroom to study a general curriculum.

   

• Information
  It is frequently assumed that citizens know their community, their municipality. The assumption is usually wrong. While people know their immediate surroundings, they do not know how many and who the critically poor are, what land belongs to whom, what are the underutilized resources of the municipality. In some places urban unemployment can be relieved by small scale peri-urban agriculture, the so-called green-belts.Organizing good local information, in a simple and accessible way, can open the way for a great number of local initiatives. Drawing up methodology for a typical local area database can certainly be obtained with no great effort through partnerships with universities and the community, or the city council.

  Initiatives can draw on a great number of experiences in this area, like the Sao Paulo map of social exclusion and others. Organizing local quality of life indicators is particularly interesting, since it not only allows a better understanding of the local situation, but permits local government to set objectives such as reduction of child mortality to certain numbers and so forth. The government recommendation to use child malnourishment as a lead indicator is very interesting in this regard. Organized information also allows the government to compare different local government gaps, and the rate of progress, allowing for better fund allocation.

   

• Technical support
  Technical support is largely available in the country. Making technical support available to communities, according to the necessities, is something that must be effectively organized. The Municipal Infrastructure Investment Framework correctly insists that “the focus on local governments as the financing and delivery vehicle for urban infrastructure and services is critical: a local process will be better able to bring government closer to communities, increase accountability and strengthen local government structures.” It also stresses the importance of the participation of local communities as stakeholders, to ensure that services are demand driven.Making the deprived communities effective partners in the process implies not only they are trained, but that they have flexible access to technical support for their own internal projects, as well for adequate negociations concerning larger infrastructure investments.

  A permanent scheme of support can imply making the communities know the institutions and technicians at their disposal for consultation, organizing inter-disciplinary teams to help drawing up scenarii of local infrastructures and basic services, organizing information on the different technical solutions and so forth.

  It also implies an open mentality which the technicians do not always have, to put themselves at the communities service, understanding that technical solutions are for people and not the reverse. This resistance to change should not be underestimated, and should itself be the object of systematic action.

  We have highlighted here the issues of communications, money, training, information and technical support. In every one of these areas, much action is being taken. It is essential to understand, nevertheless, that sectoral logic, whereby for exemple the health services train people in a number of communities, is not the same as local space logic.

  For things to work at the local and community level, the technical discussions shoud be possible when the community needs them, the funding should be made available when action is undertaken and so forth. Many communities and local governments receive at different moments the information, the training, the technical support, the promises and the deliveries, according to the different regional programmes of different ministries.

  A corporation works because the workforce, the machinery, the electricity, the technical expertise, the raw materials are simultaneously present, permitting organized action. When it is said that the local governments should own the programmes, it means that they have to have authority on the complete process. The image normally used to make this point is that when a house is built, the man in charge of building it cannot succeed if delivering cement, sending the bricks, authorizing the payments, bringing nails all depend on the internal programmes of the different companies that produce the materials or authorize payments. It is at the level of impact that the coordination must take place, hence the importance of local participation to replace complex bureaucracies.

  Until the whole set of local management structures is in place, the essential elements of local action should follow a fast track. And organizing the support for the creation of the institutional environment for this to happen should be a key point of interest to Unicef.

6 – Strategies

The basic government white papers on urban developement, rural development, public service transformation, as well as the National Economic Development and Labour Council papers and others, are of very high quality, and bring a fresh approach to the tiring left-right discussions on the role of the state. They deal directly and honestly with the key issues of social disparities, economic development and environment sustainability, not as theoretical papers, but as action oriented guidelines to be discussed with the different government tiers, business, unions and community organizations.

The following suggested strategies pin-point some issues that have appeared to be insufficiently stressed, or that were not raised in the consulted papers.

• Lead actionsEvery community has key interests, or simply necessities it is more conscious of, or more prepared to tackle. The housing savings schemes, of the homeless’ federation, for example, have relied on simple savings and state funding to organize communities around what stimulates man most: having a home. And they organized the most reliable and less concerned about power, which according to a male representative of the federation are the women. It is important to let the communities chose to organize around the issues they consider most important. Once the community starts to organize, the administration has an organized counterpart, and can start other actions. 
• The urban/rural issueIt is important to stress that the classical urban/rural divisions do not apply adequately to South Africa. Lonely settlements in the middle of a rural landscape, away from jobs and services or from urban infrastructure, and also away from any agricultural basis, are more related to camps with all the historical memories this brings to us, then to any urban or rural culture. Reconstructing the rural and urban logic of townships, hostels and informal settlements is an enormous challenge.It is important to take in consideration that while the process or urbanization is a fundamental world-wide trend, we will be soon rebuilding the urban/rural relationship from the cities. In other words, the logic of the rural areas will not be given by farmers, but by the dominant urban population which will be reconstructing its rural complementarities. Cities have been built around industries, but industry does not need cities any more. And the services are being rapidly rationalized with the computer revolution. The employment issue is becoming central, and the rural world cannot be seen as just a basis for modern farming. Cities like Copenhague, which have advanced long ago with the integration of the city into its rural context, open new horizons to the urban/rural logic for which we must find new solutions.

   

• The lead potential of decentralized servicesSome activities need to reach every person: health and education, in particular, obey to capillary structures, as they have to be in touch with virtually every household and every individual, in one way or another. These capillary structures must not necessarily be confined to their technical areas. Health structures can have a greater say in the organization of the communities they serve. Schools, besides assuring classes for children, may become cultural and scientific centers destined to prepare the communities for the knowledge intensive development of tomorrow. Thus the naturally decentralized activites can serve as lead sectors in the creation of decentralized management capacity in other sectors. 
• Transformation of the public servicesThe impressive fragmentation of the public services, their heavy bureaucracy, their scattered structures around the former islands of white population, offer in fact a great opportunity for major change and an overall modernization. Likewise, the erratic territorial divisions in magisterial districts, health districts, education districts and so forth open a clear historical opportunity to bring an overall administrative rationality. Although from a traditional centralized point of view, such discrepancies could be supported, when a community has to organize integrated development, it cannot refer to different geographical units for every problem. 
• Child related activities as a leadUnicef adopted a motto, that child-friendly cities are people friendly cities. In many cities of the world, communities with deep political and economic differences managed to sit together around the problem of children, as can be seen in the Mayors Defenders of Children initiative. Malnourished children, street children, children out of school are powerful reminders of what Nelson Mandela called our “essential humanity”. Getting the role-players of a community, or of a city, to decide as a question of honor that no child will go hungry, or will be reduced to prostitution, or will be out of school, is something that can be organized. And when we build a city that is humane with its children, it tends to become humane with itself.

7 – Suggested research

The world is changing too quickly for even experienced administrators to have the answers. In the consulted documents and the discussions with officials of the government, NGO’s, street children and others, it became clear that some areas need a strong research effort.

• The family unitThe “what is happening to the family?” question was raised in different places. In the United States, only some 23% of homes have both parents and children. The South African family, submitted to jobs where the separation from the family was deliberately sought, torn away from its rural roots, forced to the most diverse survival strategies, must certainly be changing deeply. A joint government/Unicef/universities research would be of great importance, for it is difficult to work on basic issues of children and women with outdated concepts on so essential a component as the family. 
• The family survival strategyFamilies do not wait for government to survive. In adverse circumstances, they resort to migration, internal division of tasks, small-scale commerce, illegal activities. A better understanding of how the families get organized to respondo to their economic necessities has opened important perspectives in other countries, and could for example be a powerful instrument for the stimulation of the local economic development (LED) the government is trying to promote. 
• Demographic trendsSince the Census is to take place at the end of this year (1996), some general and fundamental questions will certainly be answered. Nevertheless, deep demographic changes are taking place in the country, which for example confuse teachers in school, since they receive children they never saw, and see others disappear in the middle of the school year. A qualitative investigation based on samples would be important for the government to plan infrastructure investment, and for a better understanding of the process of change in the country. 
• EmploymentEmployment is rapidly becoming the key issue of both developing and developed countries. Nedlac works with such crude estimates as 30 to 40% of active population unemployed. We know that modern industrial employment is shrinking, that modern services like banks are reducing employment at still a quicker pace. In the particularly dramatic situation of South Africa, large scale unemployment combined with rural exodus and weak social infrastructures may generate critical problems. A finely tuned following of employment trends and the unemployment situation would be extremely important, with research that could be developed in partnership envolving government, Unicef, Cosatu and universities.

8 – Recommendations for Unicef

South Africa is a country where human rights have been flagrantly violated as a matter of government policy during a long period of time. Reversing the injustices is an enourmous endeavour for the current Government of National Unity, and the international community should put its share in the effort, especially in view of the fact that it is currently an important case of transition towards a human development oriented model.

The uniqueness of this development model deserves to be supported and monitored closely for its results. The current dominant development models in the rest of the developing world and the countries in transition, has frequently led to increasing poverty levels, deeper income and social disparities and more often than not negative changes in the environment. The South African experience provides an important opportunity of trying out alternatives policies.

The Unicef Programme in South Africa has the opportunity to be unique in that the country has its own financial resources to implement inovative programmes wich do not depend on external funding. Since in South Africa, policies, institutions and implementation systems necessarily have to be transformed from the exclusionary apartheid system that was also unique in its perversity, to adjust to the new political and social project, UNICEF can and should play a most important role in advising the social policy development, institution building, unification of fragmented service provision, establishment of information systems and capacity building that the new unified model requires. This special type of Country Programme necessarily requires high level technical staff of the most diversified knowledge, especially in view of the magnitude of the changes being sought and the high level of the government counterpart that is proven not only by the rich discussions held by this mission but also by the high level of sofistication of the documents being prepared by the government.

Regarding specific activities, aside from policy formulation and institutional development, emphasis will probably be needed in supporting capacity building at all levels of government and most specially at local government level; in supporting the establishment of information systems; and in the creation of a mass communication system in order to support the education efforts and to improve community participation in its partnership with government.

The opportunity of early work with authorities that later consolidate as such has proven its benefits in earlier UNICEF work. Establishing relations with Mayors as soon as possible, even before many of the mayor social service delivery functions are legaly assigned to them will pave the road for future common efforts. Even though practical work with two or three selected local authorities would be desirable in order to gain experience and start the process, the ideal situation is to support an coalition of local governments in their efforts to protect children and broaden their opportunities for development.

Another important issue is that South Africa, with its dynamic demographic change and the fact that 80% of the economic output is urban, provides Unicef with an opportunity to upgrade its urban-oriented social policies. This is clearly the case, for example, of water and sanitation policies, where the individual latrine pits and water wells usually implemented in rural areas do not correspond to the more systemic solutions necessary in urban areas with greater population density.

In the general trend that is leading from vertical and sector oriented social delivery systems to territory-based integration, horizontal coordination, networking and more knowledge-intensive action, South Africa offers Unicef an opportunity to gain more experience in this programme implementation philosophy.

The process of transformation will not be easy, will be plagued both by overlaps and gaps and will necessarilly have to follow a path of sucessive approximations as soon as existing constraints can be overcome. Would South Africa succeed, it could become a model and a hope for the future of the African Region. UNICEF needs to keep up with such an effort.

List of consulted documents

South Africa Country Programme Strategy Note
E/ICEF/1996/P/L.6
New York, 10 November 1995

White Paper on Reconstruction and Development
Parliament of the Republic of South Africa
Cape Town, 23 November 1994

Taking the RDP Forward
A Draft Framework for a National Growth and Development Strategy. Confidential Draft
20 February 1996

The RDP. The First Year Reviewed
Ministry of the Office of the President
April 27, 1995

Rural Development Strategy of the GNU
Ministry in the Office of the President
Pretoria, 3 November 1995

Urban Development Strategy of the GNU
Ministry in the Office of the President
Pretoria, 3 November 1995

White Paper on the Transformation of the Public Service
Ministry of the Public Service and Administration
Pretoria, 24 November 1995

Water Supply and Sanitation Policy White Paper
Department of Water Affairs and Forestry
Cape Town, November 1994

National Sanitation Policy
Draft White Paper on Sanitation
GNU National Sanitation Task Team
South Africa, November 1995

Draft White Paper for Social Welfare
Ministry for Welfare and Population Development
Pretoria, 2 February 1996

A New Housing Policy and Strategy for South Africa
White Paper
Department of Housing
Pretoria, 23 December 1995

The Organization, Governance and Funding of Schools Education White Paper 2
Department of Education
Pretoria, February 1996

Green Paper: Policy Proposals for a New Employment Standards Statute
Ministry of Labour
Pretoria, 23 February 1996

The National Small Business Enabling Act in Draft Bill Form
Department of Trade and Industry
Pretoria, 15 Decenber 1995

Municipal Infrastrucutre Investment Framework
Ministry of the Office of the President and
the Department of National Housing
25 October,1995

Making People-Driven Development Work
Commission on Development Finance formed by the
South African National Civic Organisation
Johannesburg, 11 April 1994

Local Government Transition Act
Proclamation R65 of 30 June 1995

Towards a National Health System
Draft for Discussion
Department of Health
Pretoria, November 1995

Urban Environment
Urbanization and Health Newsletter, No 26
National Urbanization and Health Programme
September 1995

Discussion Document on a Framework for Social Partnership
and Agreement-Making in NEDLAC
National Economic Development and Labour Council
Johannesburg, 16 October 1995

NEDLAC: Towards a Social Partnership
Interview Naidoo
RSA Review, 1995

Correctional Services Act, 1995
Amendment of the Correctional Services Regulations
Department of Correctional Services
Pretoria, 7 June 1995

Key Indicators of Poverty in South Africa
Ministry in the Office of the President
Reconstruction and Development Programme
October 1995

Draft Programme Plans of Operation: 1997-2001
GNU/UNICEF
Pretoria, 8 March 1996

Transcending the Legacy
Children in the New Southern Africa
AEI SARDC UNICEF
August, 1995

Negotiating Change: Building Local Democracy in South Africa
The Urban Age, Volume Three, Number Four
UMP Programme (UNDP/UNCHS/World Bank)
Washinton D.C., January 1996

Rehabilitation of Children in Especially Difficult
Circumstances/Child Victims of Apartheidand Implementing
the Convention of the Rights of the Child. “An MCH Perspective”,
Draft for DiscussionUNICEF
Johannesburg, undated

Children in Especially Difficult Circimstances, Programme Plan of Operations (Draft)
UNICEF, undated

Children in Especially Difficult Circumstances in South Africa UNICEF
Johannesburg, 1994

Proposed Programme of Cooperation Between The Government of National Unity and UNICEF: Health and Nutrition Programme Draft for Discussion
UNICEF
Pretoria, 4 March 1996

UNICEF and South African Government of National Unity Programme of Cooperation.
Programme Plan of Operations 1997-2001. Social Development Programme
UNICEF
South Africa, December 1995

UNICEF and South African Government of National Unity Programme of Cooperation. `Programme Plan of Operations 1997-2001. Social Policy and Programme Development
UNICEF
South Africa, 20 February 1996

Education Master Plan of Operations and Programme Plan of Operations 1997-2001
Draft
UNICEF, undated

Hygene and Environmental Sanitation Programme Plan of Operations for UNICEF Cooperation in South Africa (1997-2001) Draft for Discussion
UNICEF
December 1995

External Relations and Communications Draft Programme Plan of Operations 1997-2001
Zero Draft
UNICEF, undated

South Africa’s Nine Provinces: A Human Development Profile
Development Bank of Southern Africa
March 1995

Housing Capacity Building Programme (Draft)
UNDP/UNCHS
Pretoria, undated

Annual Report For The Year to 31 March 1995
Development Bank of Southern Africa
1995

1979-1995 Commemorative Issue
National Manpower Commission, 1995

A National Household Survey of Health Inequalities in South Africa
Community Agency for Social Equity
Kaiser Foundation
October 1995

The People’s Dialogue and South African Homeless People’s Federation.
from the Draft 1996 Global Report on Human Settlements
London, July 1995

South African Statistics
Central Statistical Service
Pretoria, 1994

The Street Children of Hillbrow
Jill Swart
Witwatersrand University Press
Johannesburg 1990

Street Children The Institute for the Study of Man in Africa
ISMA Paper No 40
Johannesburg, October 1990

The South African Street Child: Developmental Implications
David Donald and Jill Swart-Kruger
South Africa Journam of Psychology, 1994, 24 (4)

Street Children Have Dreams Too
Street Wise
Johannesburg, undated