The OR Tambo District Municipality and the Walter Sisulu University of Technology hosted the Rural Development Indaba held in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape with the aim of creating partnerships with rural communities.
During the course of the Indaba, it emerged that accessing government services continues to be a major challenge for residents living in rural areas. The OR Tambo District Municipality is one of the poorest districts in the country.
Small businesses from the OR Tambo region came to showcase their work at the Indaba.
They came from varied sectors including agriculture, fashion design, and crafts. One of the entrepreneurs Khayakazi Shange, says their hope is to get financial assistance from government and create employment for the youth.
“I started doing earrings in 2019. You can get my earrings in Lesotho and other provinces. I also do them in bulk so that can buy and resell them. My wish is for government to fund me so that my business can grow.”
“My wish is also to have my own fashion designing school to help youth because we know that most of the youth is not working,” Shange adds.
Develop and give services
The mayor of the O.R.Tambo District Municipality, Mesuli Ngqondwana, says they want to develop and give services to businesses in rural areas.
“We need to ensure that all services are accessible in those rural areas so that our people don’t need to move to urban areas in order for them to get complete lines. We do have some structured interactions with farmer organisations in the district. We find ways to connect them in the running water within our system, in areas where it’s impossible we try to intervene with boreholes, in that regard, we are not where we wish to be, we still have serious backlogs.”
The spokesperson of Walter Sisulu University, Yonela Tukwayo, says tertiary education institutions can play a pivota role in the development of rural communities.
“Our rural communities face a number of problems, high unemployment rate, high rate of poverty and those are the things that lead to crime. We also have a high dependency on state social grants. So Rural Indaba such as this one is the place to see what new knowledge we can develop, and what initiatives as institutions of higher learning, along with private companies and government institutions. Interventions we can put in place in order to turn the tide of poverty and lack of social facilities in our communities. ” – Reporting by Nomzwanele Mngoma
