Chairperson, thank you to Ms Makgate for the question. The issues of migration, as I indicated earlier, are a huge problem that government faces, whether with regard to health, education or any other service.
Whilst we did not receive a formal report in relation to what the situation is in Mamusa, we have received reports from the North West province in relation to the challenge of migration, which results in the depleting of numbers in rural schools and an increase in numbers in urban and township schools.
This phenomenon expresses itself not only in the North West province but across the nine provinces. This calls for an innovative approach. The North West, together with the Free State, has been in the lead in doing several things. Amongst them is the merging of schools. As we speak today, if my memory serves me right, some 2 000 schools have fewer than 100 learners making up the learner population. This results in multigrade teaching, and difficulties in retaining staff and providing adequate infrastructure.
In terms of what provinces are doing, Limpopo is also looking at this more closely because in the past many of our learners from the urban areas and our townships would go to Mpumalanga and Limpopo, where there were hostels and where quality education was provided. We are now reverting to that. Hostels have been established in the Free State and in some parts of the North West. This would address problems in those areas where there is a drastic reduction in learner numbers in order to ensure that they go to a facility that is adequately resourced, has good infrastructure and where good learning and teaching takes place.
So, provinces are looking at creative ways of doing this. As indicated earlier, the learner tracking system will assist us a great deal in ensuring that we are able to monitor the migration of learners from one area to the other.
One of the challenges that we face as the Department of Basic Education is to ensure that we continue to retain good educators in rural areas. Some of the reasons for migration are that parents send their children to urban and township schools in order to ensure that they receive a better quality of education.
We have incentives for educators and rewards for teaching in the rural areas and for teaching scarce-skill, subjects such as mathematics, science, accountancy and languages. We thought this would assist in retaining educators. We are also looking very closely at the possibilities of providing accommodation in rural areas to ensure that we are able to retain those educators. In that way we will ensure that the number of learners in our rural schools are not dramatically reduced. These are some of the measures that have been taken.
Migration is a problem that faces not only South Africa, but countries throughout the continent and across the world. It is something that we have to be very attentive to at all times. Thank you.
Action to be taken by department to solve problem of double allocation of Reconstruction and Development Programme houses in Dr K Kaunda region
34. Ms M W Makgate (ANC) asked the Minister of Human Settlements:
What action will his department take to solve the problem of double allocation of the Reconstruction and Development Programme houses in Dr K Kaunda region, where one person has a key and another has a letter indicating the ownership of the same house?