Giyani - President Jacob Zuma has launched a rural development programme which will see at least one person from each household in the small, impoverished village of Muyexe in Limpopo finding employment.
"I am very pleased to say that because of this programme we are launching today, every household in Muyexe Village will have at least one person employed, for a period of two years," said the President at the launch of the Comprehensive Rural Development programme (CRDP) on Monday.
He said there will also be an exit strategy, implemented six months before the two-year contract ends, to ensure that participants in the programme are able to get jobs or start a business enterprise to sustain themselves when the contract ends.
These job opportunities were created during the pilot of the programme over the last few months.
The CRDP was piloted in the Greater Giyani Local Municipality after the President announced that government would develop and implement a comprehensive rural development strategy in his State of the Nation Address.
"We are pleased to be here today to bring that undertaking to fruition, to launch the Giyani project. The former homeland areas will become a central focus of the rural development programme," he said.
The President said he would work with communities, traditional leaders and councilors, to speed up this work and realise his goal of developing rural areas.
Collective developmental interventions will initially focus on meeting the people's basic needs, especially food security. The next step is the entrepreneurial stage and large scale infrastructure development which would finally culminate in the emergence of small, micro and medium enterprises and village markets.
"The CRDP is our national collective strategy in our joint fight against poverty, hunger, unemployment and lack of development in our rural areas. It is an embodiment of our unshaken commitment that we shall not rest in our drive to eradicate poverty," said the President.
He said the indicator of the measure of the success of the comprehensive rural development programme will, amongst others, be the level of social cohesion and development facilitated in the rural areas.
"The extent to which our rural communities have the infrastructure you find in urban areas as well as possibilities of income generating activities, will also be a good performance indicator. The programme must ensure the delivery of clean water, decent shelter to proper sanitation and enterprises development support," he said.
There are other interventions in the pipepline and that government had pledged over R2.6 billion in conditional grants to provinces over the medium term. "This will be used for agricultural infrastructure, training and advisory services and marketing, and for upgrading agricultural colleges."
Mr Zuma further announced that government would create job opportunities for each household in each village that the programme is rolled out to.
"This will apply equally to all rural areas where the project is being implemented. In this period of two years, those contracted in the created job opportunities will be provided with training," he said.
The CRDP was approved by Cabinet last Wednesday. It is based on three key pillars namely: coordinated and integrated broad-based agrarian transformation; an improved land reform programme and strategic investments in economic and social infrastructure in rural areas
