The effectiveness of the South Africa-Cuban Technical Support Programme (SACTSP) in improving the quality of life of housing beneficiaries in South Arica

Abstract

The post-apartheid government inherited an urban housing backlog of approximately 1.3 million units at its inception in 1994. This huge backlog was partially contributed by apartheid discriminatory administrations and laws such as the Black (Native) Laws Amendment Act, No 46 of 1937 and the Black Communities Development Act, No 4 of 1984 along with rapid urbanization during the post-apartheid period. In a bid to address past injustice related to housing, it has become necessary for the post-apartheid government to diversify housing delivery approach to include alternative development and delivery strategies, methodologies and products including upgrading of informal settlements, and increasing rental stock. The human settlements department also encouraged the establishment and implementation of self-help housing through the establishment of the People Housing Process (PHP). It is the implementation of this programme that led to the establishment of the SACTSP aimed at enhancing South African housing service delivery using Cuban experience. The programme has been implemented in the South African human settlements sector since 2002. The focus of this research is to evaluate the impact of the South African Cuban Technical Support Programme (SACTSP) in the lives of the South African housing beneficiaries. The collected and analysed data, to a large degree, confirmed the effect of the programme in the lives of the beneficiaries. The research design of the study is a multiple Case Studies approach. The scope of the study is the three provinces participating in the SACTSP, which are Mpumalanga (MP), Western Cape (WC), and Limpopo (LP). The intention was to have both the control group and the intervention group in the same province, but due to the over usage of the CTA’s in these provinces the researcher decided to use Gauteng Province (GP), a non-participating province in the programme, as a control group. This is also due to the fact that the province (Gauteng) is also commonly known for publicly criticising the effectiveness of the SACTSP programme. Data was collected in three housing projects from the three Gauteng Metropolitan Municipalities Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and City of Johannesburg. The selected projects were Mamelodi Extension 5 in Tshwane, Villa Lisa (Boksburg) in Ekurhuleni and Driekiek Extension 3 in Orange Farm, Johannesburg. The selected projects where the CTAs participated (experimental group) were Chicago Bulls at Strand in Cape Town (WC), Thekwane South Housing Projects, Nelspruit in Mpumalanga and Westernburg at Polokwane in Limpopo Province. In each unit of evaluation, questionnaires to collect data were distributed to the rightful owners (beneficiaries) of the houses, who were above eighteen years of age. (Annexure A). The participants, all rightful owners of state subsidies, were identified by means of purposive sampling. The main goal of purposive sampling is to focus on particular characteristics of a population that are of interest, which will best enable the researcher to answer the research questions Semi-structured interview questions were also conducted to the main stakeholders in the housing circle. This includes officials in all spheres of government involves in delivering sustainable human settlements (Annexure B). The selection is also influenced by what is called the “good enough” rule in formulating evaluation research (Rossi et al., 2012:28). Stated simply the “good enough” rule advocates that the evaluator should choose the strongest possible design from a methodological stand point after having taken into account the potential importance of the results, the practicality and feasibility of each design and the probability that the design chosen will produce useful and credible results (Rossi et al., 2012:33) The collected data was analysed and presented in five principal stages involving descriptive and inferential statistics. The first phase involves presenting the reliability of the instrument using Cronbach’s alpha. The second phase presents the descriptive statistics of the sample using frequencies, and proportions for categorical data and means and standard deviations for continuous variables. The validity of the instrument then follows using exploratory factor analysis which explains the observed variables that are linked to underlying factors. The fourth phase involves calculation of composite variables using the means and averages to determine the trend patterns in the data. The central limit theorem was applied to the data and comparative analyses were done to determine whether views differed by socio-demographic variables. The two sample independent t-tests were done to determine whether views of the respondents differed for two-categorical variables and the one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to determine whether views differ for variables with more than two categories. The fifth stage presented the correlation analysis which was used to determine the extent or degree of the relationship between the constructs. The findings of the studies confirm the effectiveness of the programmes in the participating provinces. The study also discovered that, CTA’s are mostly transferring skills to contractors who happened to be working close to the CTAs and only to beneficiaries in a few instances. This is due to the nature of the self-help model that the South African government adopted which involves private contractors in building PHP houses. This model ignores the national PHP policy and guidelines which recognise beneficiaries as the main drivers of the PHP. The study concludes by recommending the department policy makers to monitor and enforce correct implementation of formulated policy to close the gaps that are usually created between policy formulation and implementation.