Deputy Speaker, in reality, municipalities do not generally have sufficient capacity to implement the Expanded Public Works Programme, EPWP. This is generally due to the lack of sufficient civil engineering skills in the country. So, the department has put in place a number of measures to assist the municipalities to implement the EPWP. The department has appointed deputy directors based in the national Department of Public Works to the regional offices to help provide technical support to the municipalities to implement this programme.
The department, also in partnership with the Local Government Sector Education and Training Authority, has trained over 1 200 officials in the different municipalities in labour-intensive methods of construction. The department has further developed the implementation guidelines and technical briefs to help the municipalities' technical officials to implement the programme. The EPWP reporting timelines are communicated to all stakeholders, and municipalities that participate in the programme are able to report on time with the assistance of the data capturers that have been deployed by the Department of Public Works in the regional offices and the data capturers that are in the EPWP data centre.
So, the figures reported are subject to monitoring validation tests to ensure that the quality of that data conforms to the minimum requirements. Technical support personnel in the provinces also assist in the collection of that particular data. So, data from all public bodies is captured in the EPWP reporting system as per the prescribed data fields and validation rules. So, validation rules are applied to the reported data during the collation, and projects that do not pass the validation rules due to poor data quality are excluded from the final quarterly reports. Thank you.