(AsgiSA) Annual Report 2008 - South African Government Information
(AsgiSA) Annual Report 2008 - South African Government Information
(AsgiSA) Annual Report 2008 - South African Government Information
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Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for <strong>South</strong> Africa<br />
ANNUAL REPORT<br />
<strong>2008</strong><br />
7. Governance and institutional issues<br />
<strong>AsgiSA</strong> identified the critical importance of the organisation and capacity of the State in relation<br />
to the challenge of accelerated and shared economic growth, and prioritised a number<br />
of interventions in this area in the 2007 <strong>Annual</strong> <strong>Report</strong>. These included:<br />
• implementing recommendations from the capacity assessment in relation to the Public<br />
Transport Strategy, micro-finance initiatives and issuing minerals and petroleum licences<br />
• implementing recommendations of the Vulindlela exercises to enhance the human resources<br />
function, job retention and recruitment and organisational structure within the<br />
departments of trade and industry and of minerals and energy, and provincial agriculture<br />
and economic departments<br />
• implementing the mainstreaming of the Project Consolidate approach to all 283 municipalities<br />
into the five-year Local <strong>Government</strong> Strategic Agenda – 2011<br />
• finalising the review of development-finance institutions (DFIs) by January <strong>2008</strong><br />
• piloting and implementing appropriate regulatory impact assessment (RIA) tools<br />
• finalising implementation of new environmental impact assessment (EIA) processes and<br />
introducing alternative environmental impact management tools where appropriate<br />
• finalising and introducing into Parliament the Land Use Management Bill<br />
• introducing a “one-stop” investor centre within the context of restructuring trade and<br />
investment marketing and the promotion of <strong>South</strong> Africa.<br />
The Capacity Assessment Programme in the Governance and Administration Cluster was instated<br />
in an attempt to answer the question of the President as to whether the Public Service<br />
had the skills required to implement the developmental state. The aim of the programme is<br />
to identify the areas that negatively influence the Public Service’s ability to deliver on its set<br />
goals and then make recommendations towards the improvement of these influences. This<br />
process is not necessarily focusing on departments that are performing badly but it is rather<br />
focused on where effectiveness and efficiency within the Public Service can be improved.<br />
To this end, the assessment of departments’ capacity to support the implementation of<br />
<strong>AsgiSA</strong> was conducted in the area of ICT. This area was chosen as it is one of the scare skills<br />
that have been identified in ASgiSA. This assessment noted that the <strong>Government</strong> employed<br />
the services of the State <strong>Information</strong> Technology Agency (Sita) to perform most of its ICT<br />
requirements, hence departments outsource this functions to Sita. The analysis looked at<br />
the employment profile of the ICT skills within the Public Service and found that there had<br />
been a steady growth within this sector. For instance, while in 2003, government employed<br />
1 016 ICT practitioners, this number increased to 1 702 in 2007. There seems to be a very<br />
high vacancy turnover in this sector. Due to this high turnover rate, the ICT sector is largely<br />
made up of young professionals who are still fairly new in the job with one to five years’<br />
experience.<br />
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