Economic and Rural Development

Rural Development Summit
Rural Development Summit
Cata
Agisa

Goal

The goal of this programme is to develop strategies and facilitate initiatives that protect jobs, create decent work, and accelerate structural transformation of the provincial economy through active Industrial and Rural development strategies.

Programme Purpose

The purpose of the Economic and Rural Development Programme is to support the implementation of the Provincial Industrial Development Strategy and the Rural Development Strategy.

The Programme

The main responsibility of this programme is to design and implement support strategies in responding to the request from local and provincial government and other social partners. The programme provides economic analysis and analysis of impact of planned and existing interventions at provincial and local government level. The programme also seeks to provide technical support and advice to targeted provincial departments, municipalities and public and private entitites.

The programme responds to a situation where employment levels in the Eastern Cape are declining. Nationally the recession has resulted in over a million jobs being lost. It is expected that these numbers of job losses could increase given the lag effect of the recession. Some of the research conducted in the Eastern Cape suggests that over 190 000 jobs could be lost (as a worst case scenario). It is critical to realise that job losses in the Eastern Cape manufacturing sector have been occurring since before the 1994 democratic dispensation in South Africa. Research indicates that over 26% of jobs (over 30 000) were lost in manufacturing between 1995 and 2008.

At provincial level the economy remains insufficiently transformed and dominated by finance, government services, retail trade and automotive sector. The past 15 years have seen high levels of de-industrialization in the non-auto manufacturing sector, and job shedding hampering manufacturing growth (with GVA up 27% over past 13 years and employment down 27% over the same period). At the same time however, we have strategic assets, including two IDZs, and have competitive advantage in a number of key sectors that have been prioritised in Department of Trade and Industry’s (DTI’s) Industrial Policy Action Plan and in our own Industrial Development Strategy.

Rural areas are particularly affected by uneven development. They are characterised by extremely high levels of poverty and quality of life is not sufficiently improving. Rural incomes are not increasing at an adequate pace, and rural productive capacity has not been optimized. Land reform continues to proceed at a snail’s pace.

Going forward we need a new growth path that is more labour absorptive and redistribution focused driven by a more interventionist developmental state. Both the Industrial Development Strategy and the Rural Development Strategy are aimed at addressing structural weaknesses and underdevelopment in the provincial economy. This programme aims to address the above by developing programmes and projects and building the institutional capacity of relevant state structures to accelerate the effective implementation of the industrial development and rural development strategies.