Briefing by the Financial and Fiscal Commission (FFC) on the funding and provision of child welfare services

Journalist: Has the FCC done any estimation of what full funding would imply, the sum involved and what we are currently spending? What are the reasons for provincial variation, is it a provincial to competence that allows provinces to decide for themselves or they are not budgeting according to proper guidelines. Also the inefficiencies in the delivery in the delivery chain, could you give examples? Could you explain more what statutory and non-statutory services are and also give an overall judgment of our childcare as society, how you would assess it.

 

Response: Statutory services were those services that the Children’s Act specifically says government “must” provide those services. Non-statutory services were those that the Children’s Act uses “may”. Regarding full funding, at the moment different stakeholders are discussing what the principles of childcare services should be. This would involve if insurance should be paid by the state to Non Profit Organisations. Once that criterion has been established, that is when you can determine the full costs of full funding.

 

Journalist: How can the differences of funding in provinces be addressed? Another issue that has been raised consistently by other leaders in government and also outside government, the Deputy President raised it as well as the former Governor of the Reserve Bank; this is regarding the sustainability of the social grant system. Because there were so many children who received social grants, totaling 11 million and more, it has been said that in the long term the system is not sustainable. What is your view? How can the government fix the matter because the number is increasing? The Minister of Social Development responded to one Parliamentary question said the number could go up to 17 or 18 million in the next two years. There was a question of the budget there; currently the budget is over R100 Billion.

 

Mr Khumalo: Regarding to the sustainability question, in our submission that we have made for 2014/15 Division of Revenue in May. We conducted a rigorous exercise to look at whether the social assistance package is sustainable. The outcome was that it is, however there are inefficiencies that need to be addressed and there are measures to be put in place to ensure that those that are in the system are not in the system permanently. It needs to utilise the education and healthcare system, you cannot look at these grants or welfare packages in isolation they needed to be linked to education and healthcare systems so that those people that benefit make use of the afore mention system to get themselves out of being dependent on the system. There are two different issues at play; 1. The level at which the system creates dependency, which were a lot of the debate is situated. 2. The objectives of the system, the objective of the system is not saying people must be dependent. It says how do we develop mentally; use this system to move these people to a better level where they can sustain themselves. If you look at it holistically you get a different set of issues.

Regarding the funding disparities, there have to be minimum norms and standards that are set by the national Department, against which we can measure. We need to understand that the disparities are caused by the nature of the provinces. We did not expect that delivery of childcare services in the Northern Cape would cost the same as they would in Gauteng. Things like distance of where the children were actually situated - Gauteng is very compact, it’s very dense, and the cases they might have to deal with are abuse and social types of things. Whereas in the Northern Cape there will be poverty related issues and there is also the issue of distances and dispersion of the population that creates challenges of its own in terms of the cost of delivering those services. But with these differences you have to objectively assess the key drivers. The report does mention the key drivers of differing costs.

The state of child welfare could be better than where it is, but certainly we are not doing as badly as other countries we like to compare ourselves with, we have a far more advanced system. But, by the standards we normally judge ourselves on, there is still a lot of improvement we need. There fact that there was court cases pending means that there is something that is fundamentally not going right.

 

Ms Ajam: We are significantly below full cost. The differences between costing in provinces would be attributed to, there is often huge pressure on personnel expenditure and personnel expenditure pretty much crowded out everything else. Another reason could be differences in prioritisation, where one province could be placing greater priority on child services than others. Also if you look at existing infrastructure, what you find is that facilities for children tend to be concentrated in urban areas, so the operational expenses of those facilities tend to be higher. Monitoring systems are also not in place. South Africa compared to BRICK and other African countries, on the grant side does quite well on the grant side, but on services there were huge disparities especially in rural areas that needed to be addressed urgently. Many of the issues we are raising in this report have been acknowledged by government and there are plans to address these. Our point was that it needed to done in a matter of agency.

 

Journalist: From what you are saying I am getting the impression that all childcare services are delivered by NPOs and government has outsourced the full function. Was that correct?

 

Mr Khumalo: Not all services have been outsourced; there were services that the Department offered in a very direct way. NPOs and NGOs were service providers like any other, but obviously in this area there were quite a number of them that are service providers to government.

 

Journalist: Have you come across the mechanism of conditional registration. When the Children’s Act was passed, Parliament allowed this built in mechanism where NPOs could not meet the norms and standards to get conditional registration. That was important as it allowed them to their registration certificate, which is the gateway to government funding. What we found was that provincial departments were not giving emerging NPOs conditional registration and were not assisting them to reach the norms and standards.

 

Mr Khumalo: The one thing that needs to be understood, is that quite a number of these attempts around dealing with emerging and empowering types of NPOs in an environment that the is already noncompliance by existing NPOs.

 

Ms Ajam: There is dedicated funding to build capacity within NPOs, not only for the quality of delivering but also in terms of their financial management so that we meet some of the audit requirements as well as the governance requirements.

 

Journalist: In your report you raised some key challenges. Were you able to see the extent what these challenges have caused regarding the children that need the service? Regarding the recommendation, failing to implement them, do you think the sector would be in a crisis?

 

Mr Khumalo: We are not in a crisis position, but we needed to up our game. But we are talking about a crisis, if things deteriorate further what can happen was that if the NPOs providing the service were to collapse then there would be a problem. But we were certainly not at that point.

 

Prof Steytler: The report came from a place of concern.

 

Journalist: Page 78 - in terms of per capita spending on child services, it seems differences for 2010 and 2011 of per capita spending versus that of 2011 and 2012 you hardly see a significant increase in terms of the services the Act (Child Act and Child Justice Act) required to be rendered. Based on this could you say that provinces did not plan that well for in implementing the services required by that Act?

 

Mr Khumalo: We cannot say it is because they did not plan very well, what we have established the patterns were not showing any reasonable trend towards progressive realisation. What the figures say is that this is area is a soft target in the budget process.

 

The media briefing came to a close.