Rural development: Putting theory into practice
Evolution of rural development in South Africa
The National Rural Development Strategy and the Rural Development Framework
The National Rural Development Strategy (NRDS) of 1995 and the Rural Development
Framework (RDF) of 1997 were the first concerted attempts to institute a rural development
programme in the post-apartheid era. The NRDS was a “rights-based” 25-year vision that sought to free rural communities from poverty by creating productive jobs through supporting commercial activities, diversified agriculture, providing infrastructure, ensuring rural-urban spatial linkages, building local capabilities and promoting close collaboration amongst local government, civil society and private sector (Integrated Rural Development Sector Strategy:
Draft Version, 2022). One of the limitations of the strategy is that it did not account for local
institutional realities such as traditional leadership governance and customary relations could influence the direction of development interventions. With the advent of GEAR, the NRDS “took a backseat” and a revised strategy called the National Development Framework was developed (IRDSS: Draft Version, 2022). Having identified the key obstacles as landlessness, skewed land ownership and development patterns as well as the apartheid spatial planning patterns the RDF aimed to integrate rural communities into the mainstream economy by entrenching participatory local democratic governance, building infrastructure, building local economies through promoting entrepreneurship and access to investment capital, promoting sustainable livelihoods and building local capacities to plan and implement. Whilst it points to the need for coordinated implementation, RDF had no successes as it was not fully embraced as a government strategy (IRDSS: Draft Version, 2022).
Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Strategy
Developed in 2000, ISRDS was a spatially focused intervention where 15 rural nodes were
identified in the country’s poorest districts. Its vision was socially cohesive, stable and viable communities with the ability to attract skills and knowledge to build sustainable local
communities. The ISRDS viewed cooperation at the local level between government institutions and informal organisations such as NGOs and CBOs as key to the development and empowerment of local communities (DLA, 2000). It listed as amongst its core principles participatory and integrative development, cooperative governance, local capacity to implement programmes and good governance. The ISRDS’s approach to rural development was the decentralization of decision-making and implementation (DLA, 2000). This is also referred to, in academia, as “endogenous development” (Barquero, 2007). Like the Rural Development Framework, the ISRDS was not project-driven but identified coordination of government programmes as the key necessity for successful implementation.
The ISRD strategy of 2000 came at the period of GEAR’s austerity measures and did not “add any value” given that no additional funding was set aside by the government for its
implementation (Public Service Commission, 2009). The ISRDS strategy was dropped in 2009 when the government adopted the CRDP. Given the ideological and theoretical dithering within the ruling party, it would have been unlikely for CRDP to be a decisive break from the earlier strategies. Evidence of this is the party’s adoption of the technocratic, instead of its vouched ideological, approach to development (Taspcott, 1997), the failure to appreciate the skewed but interdependent rural-urban and rich-poor linkages as seen in former President Mbeki’s two nations in one dichotomy (Du Toit & Neves, 2007; Black et al, 2017) as well as, and perhaps even more ominously, the continued pursuit of neoliberal policies over its own Macroeconomic Research Group’s proposals for state-led investment programme (Padayachee, 2020).
War on Poverty
The War on Poverty (WOP) was a 2008 Special Presidential Programme aimed at transversal coordination across spheres and levels of government. According to DRDLD (2010) the government’s 2004 10-year review, just like the RDF and ISRDS, pointed to a lack of coordination in poverty interventions by the government. Therefore, whilst some gains had been scored in fighting poverty, poor coherence within the government meant that no full account could be made of the anti-poverty interventions and their successes whilst the level of inequality was growing. Although not exclusively focused on rural development, as an “instrument of coordination, alignment, support and supervision of anti-poverty initiative” (DRDLR, 2010) WOP sought to produce a clear poverty matrix with specific interventions, where the progression of supported households is monitored from entry to exit. A concerted effort was made to address the plight of women as they were most affected by poverty and inequality. Whilst WOP produced valuable baseline information on household poverty which has been useful for government planning, it faced the same challenge as the ISRDS of lack of funding and as such its viability as a poverty reduction strategy was extremely limited.
Comprehensive Rural Development Programme
The CRDP was launched in Muyexe village in Greater Giyani Municipality, Limpopo
(DALRRD, 2009). As a pilot, Muyexe would be used together with 21 other pilot sites to better shape the CRDP concept and “to develop a coherent strategy and policy”. The medium to long - term aim was to develop an Agrarian Transformation, Rural Development and Land Reform policy that would be implemented throughout the country. The CRDP would empower communities to take responsibility for their livelihoods through optimal and sustainable use of resources. To empower communities, the government would implement a “coordinated broad - based agrarian transformation” and invest strategically in social and economic infrastructure.
The CRDP explains integrated rural development as “planning and thus a strategy for multi-
sectoral and multi-facetted interventions designed to ensure sustained improvements in the lives of rural-dwellers and rural communities” (DALRRD, 2012). This is in line with Erskine’s (1985) description of integrated rural development as entailing a comprehensive planning approach to simultaneously carry out interventions that increase agricultural productivity, provision of infrastructure and services that enable improvement of quality of life and stimulating commercial and industrial activities to boost employment. It emphasises community participation to integrate local knowledge into the design and implementation of projects. The three pillars of the CRDP are: (a) agrarian transformation which includes optimal use of resources to increase production in stock farming and cropping as well as the use of modern technology in production; (b) rural development focusing on social infrastructure like access to basic facilities, building cooperatives and savings clubs, strengthening local democratic governance and forging partnerships with government and private sector, and (c) land reform, which encompasses land redistribution, tenure reform, planning and restitution. A Rural Development Agency would be established and responsible for (a) the coordination of role players that include government, civil
society and the private sector, (b) planning and resource mobilisation, (c) monitoring and
evaluation, and lastly (d) reporting and accountability. Importantly, provinces were required to develop regional strategies based on situational analysis and the participation of communities in the identification, prioritisation and design of projects. It would be these localized strategies that would inform the roll-out of the programme to other sites.
The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform at the national level set the criteria for
the selection of the CDRP sites on two basic factors:
(a) Population size: for maximum impact, densely populated rural areas would be selected.
(b) 2001 Provincial Indices of Multiple Deprivation for South Africa based on a deprivation
index consisting of:
1) Income and material deprivation,
2) Employment deprivation,Health deprivation,
4) Education deprivation, and,
5) Living environment deprivation.
Other sites were added based on the Minister’s discretion and information from the War on
Poverty Programme. Using the above criteria, a hundred and sixty (160) sites (including the
original 22 pilots) were identified for the period 2010-2014. As Table 1 below summarises, this translated to 432,000 targeted households over the 5-year period, which would benefit an estimated rural population size of 1, 944, 000, found by multiplying the household size (4.5) and the number of targeted households. Relative to the total rural population, this amounted to only 9.9% that would benefit from the programme.
Source:
University of Witwatersrand
School of Economics and Finance
Research Report
Title: South Africa’s Rural Development Strategy, its Application and
Theoretical Underpinnings: using the application of the CRDP at
Muyexe Village as a Reflector
Mozambique Doing Business - South Africa
2025
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