Hon speaker, hon members, there are a number of government programmes aimed at capacitating and empowering households and communities to take themselves out of poverty. Our programme relating to education is one example.
However, as a co-ordinated programme in the fight against poverty, government has developed the War on Poverty Campaign, as well as a comprehensive antipoverty strategy. The former is being scaled up to cover 1 128 of the most deprived municipal wards of the country by 2014, whilst the latter is currently undergoing consultation in the National Economic Development and Labour Council, Nedlac, after receiving support from the National Antipoverty Civil Society Colloquium held in December 2009.
The antipoverty strategy focuses on the following nine pillars that seek to capacitate and empower households and communities to take themselves out of poverty with the help of government and its social partners: one, the creation of economic opportunities; two, investment in human resources; three, the provision of income security to the most vulnerable members of society; four, the provision of social and individual asset accumulation, such as housing, land, working capital and infrastructure; five, environmental sustainability; six, the provision of a social wage, such as subsidised electricity, water and sanitation services; seven, the provision of preventative and curative health care; eight, social inclusion; and nine, good governance.
It can be seen from the nine pillars that the antipoverty strategy uses most of the existing government programmes as key instruments. What is different about the antipoverty strategy is that it identifies the most deprived wards in the country using the Provincial Indices of Multiple Deprivation which have mapped all poverty areas in each province. The strategy profiles the communities and households that live in those deprived wards; collects and stores such community and household profiles in the national database; develops referrals that it sends to national and provincial departments and social partners to address the needs of those households and communities; advises national and provincial departments to develop service delivery plans that should be included in the municipal integrated development plans; and monitors and verifies the impact of service delivery performed by departments on the progress and graduation of households and communities out of poverty.
The War on Poverty programme was piloted in 2008 to 2009 by covering a ward in each province. Cabinet in May 2009 called for the scaling up of the programme to cover a total of 1 128 of the most deprived wards or a third of all the wards in the country by 2014, with an estimated three million households and an estimated 15 million people who live in extreme poverty. I thank you for your attention. [Applause.]