Pretoria – A government programme which was formed with the aim of addressing poverty and unemployment through addressing key issues of environmental degradation has celebrated 20 years of its existence.
The Department of Environmental Affairs’ Working for Water (WfW) Programme, which has now been transformed into the “Working for” programmes, has seen phenomenal growth over the last 20 years.
“These include Working on Fire, Working for Wetlands, Working for Ecosystems, Working for Forests and Eco Furniture Programmes, which have succeeded in mainstreaming ecological restoration into the employment and rural development debates,” the Department of Environmental Affairs said.
The programme’s celebration was on Thursday in Villiersdorp in the Western Cape, the same vicinity where the initial work of the programme started.
“Initially, the primary focus of WfW was purely on the management of invasive species known to have negative impacts on streamflow. It was soon realised that WfW cannot operate in isolation,” the department said.
Since the inception of the WfW programme in 1995, the family of Natural Resource Programmes has together created more than 227 100 person years of employment across South Africa.
The programmes grew from just over 6 100 employment opportunities to more than 50 000 on average over the last three years.
“For the last three years, consistently just over half of these were female and more than 60% were younger than 35 years of age.
“There has been a specific focus on the most marginalised within society,” the department said.
Furthermore, the“Working for” programmes are possibly the only programmes to target opportunities for military veterans and for parolees.
To date, some 2.8 million hectares of invasive alien plants have been treated. – SAnews.gov.za
