Roads for Rural Development

"If our budgets are not reaching grassroots communities and making a real tangible difference in the lives of poor people - who are our majority citizens and our majority voters - then we, as government, will have failed in the mandate we have been given by the people of South Africa."

- S'bu Ndebele, former KZN Minister of Transport

The Development Directorate was established to institutionalise and guarantee the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Transport’s Roads for Rural Development programme. The Roads for Rural Development programme was designed to achieve a more balanced road network throughout KwaZulu-Natal and, at the same time, to create new work and business opportunities for disadvantaged communities.

The Development Directorate is now well known for pioneering participatory research methodologies and for developing innovative programmes that fundamentally improve the life chances of resource poor communities. Thus, for example, both the CARNS study and the Road to Wealth and Job Creation Initiative were conceived by the Development Directorate. The methodology developed in CARNS has since been adopted by Moving South Africa for their rural roads assessments while the Road to Wealth and Job Creation Initiative was adopted Nationally at the October 1998 Job Summit as an important strategy to place the rural economy in South Africa on a labour absorptive growth path.

Similarly, the Development Directorate’s initiatives to promote participatory democracy, labour intensive maintenance methods (Zibambele) and emerging contractor opportunities (Vukuzakhe) have all been adopted by the National Department of Transport for implementation in other provinces.

The independent evaluation of the Development Directorate’s programmes by internationally acclaimed researchers now provides irrefutable evidence that the Roads for Rural Development programme and the Road to Wealth and Job Creation Initiative are having a positive impact on the daily lives of rural communities. Not only has there been a dramatic improvement in rural mobility and community access to services, the injection of cash into impoverished communities, through the Vukuzakhe and Zibambele programmes, is starting to bear fruit for the contractors concerned, their families, their communities and the market economy of KwaZulu-Natal.

The Development Directorate falls under the Chief Directorate: Strategic Planning, which is tasked with ensuring that the Transport Portfolio is used to:

• accelerate the transformation of KwaZulu-Natal society;

• contribute towards the creation of the wealth of our province and our country but particularly within poor communities;

• redistribute opportunities within the transport sector to address the priority needs of stakeholders, and;

• build the capacity of impoverished communities to engage the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Transport effectively.

  Contact the Development Directorate on (033) 355 8706

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