Building partnerships for community development

Theewaterskloof Municipality had won an award recently and was one of the more progressive Municipalities encouraging citizen participation.  The process they had followed was presented to the audience. The Advice Office had a partnership with the Municipality looking at small tenders which were submitted with the assistance of the Advice Office.

The discussion explored the disjuncture between the legislation and the IDP process.  Citizen participation and the access to information was also highlighted,  looking at citizens not understanding the council processes and being left out when council meetings are scheduled. The presentations done by the speakers stimulated lively debate amongst participants. If we wanted to ensure a lively democracy, this would need to be challenged at community level.  To sum up the discussion it was unanimous that participants would need to be the champions of their own development in order to address the issues they were faced with.